The growth of Internet-based piracy has led to a wide-ranging debate over how copyright policy should be enforced in the digital era. In this paper we analyze the impact of the US government's shutdown of a major piracy site — Megaupload.com — on digital sales and rentals of...

Many inventions can be legally protected either by patent or by trade secrecy, and a conventional wisdom exists on how to select between them. This Article adds to that literature by showing that corporations should have an inherent preference for trade secret over patent for reasons relating to...

We study the prevalence and traits of global collaborative patents for U.S. public companies, where the inventor team is located both within and outside of the United States. Collaborative patents are frequently observed when a corporation is entering into a new foreign region for innovative...

Consider the following scenario: your client is the purveyor of a soft drink called Gnucola. The Gnucola company has used your law firm to register the Gnucola mark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and has also used your law firm to assist it in obtaining the registration of...

Twenty one years ago, copyright died. More accurately, it was killed. In 1996, in ProCD v. Zeidenberg, Judge Easterbrook, writing for the Seventh Circuit, held that a contract that restricted the use of factual information was not preempted by the Copyright Act and therefore enforceable. The...

This report contains socio-legal research conducted on the relationship between 3D printing and intellectual property (IP) at the current point in time and in potential future scenarios, through the use of horizon-scanning methods in six countries — China, France, India, Russia, Singapore and...

Every leading firm of the current time cements their foundation with their IP portfolio. By integrating IP into every vertical — like R&D, strategic planning, product development cycles — a firm can seamlessly leverage multiple opportunities and enhance its value in the competitive market as...

In European legal scholarship, many articles discuss the equilibrium reached in the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) when the EU antitrust prohibitions apply to, and restrain, the free and ordinary use of intellectual property rights (“IPRs”). We call this...

Because China has become one of the largest applicants of PCT patents, it is of interest to compare the quality of Chinese and non-Chinese applications. We extend a quality index based on internationally comparable citation data from international search reports (ISR) to consider foreign,...

Patents and trade secrets are often considered economic substitutes. Under this view, inventors can decide either to maintain an invention as a trade secret or seek a patent and disclose to the public the details of the invention. However, a handful of scholars have recognized that because the...