In his influential paper “Contracting Into Liability Rules: Intellectual Property Rights and Collective Rights Organizations,” Rob Merges makes the case that intellectual property (IP) owners vested with property entitlements can and do contract away their right to an injunction when it is...

Patentees overwhelmingly lose their cases, despite a seeming host of procedural advantages. The same is not true of other IP plaintiffs. Why? In this article, I suggest that the explanation lies in the "fractioning" of patent law into smaller and smaller issues. Claim construction after Markman...

The theory of patent law is based on the idea that a lone genius can solve problems that stump the experts, and that the lone genius will do so only if properly incented. We deny patents on inventions that are "obvious" to ordinarily innovative scientists in the field. Our goal is to encourage...

We award patents to inventors because we hope to encourage new ideas. For this reason, the fundamental requirement for getting a patent is that you have invented something new.It is curious, then, that patent law itself purports to pay no attention to which aspects of a patentee’s invention...

How can we fix the PTO, allowing examiners to effectively distinguish between patentable and unpatentable inventions, without slowing the process to a crawl or wasting a bunch of money? This essay reviews the recent literature and considers a number of proposals and their problems. It concludes...

The United States economy is struggling to recover from its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. After several huge doses of conventional macroeconomic stimulus - deficit-spending and monetary stimulus - policymakers are understandably eager to find innovative no-cost ways of...

More than 2.5 million United States patents have been issued in the last twenty years. While these patents are spread across all industries, a large percentage are concentrated in the information technology (IT) industries, and others in biotechnology. The prevalence of patents in these...

Proposed Uniform Commercial Code article 2B, which will govern transactions in information, will remake the law of intellectual property licensing in a radical way. But federal and state intellectual property policy impose significant limits on the ability of states to change these rules by...

Proposed Uniform Commercial Code article 2B, which will govern transactions in information, will remake the law of intellectual property licensing in a radical way. But federal and state intellectual property policies impose significant limits on the ability of states to change these rules by...