Works of fiction sometimes contain disclosures of inventions that operate as a bar to patentability, preventing inventors who actually make those inventions from subsequently patenting them. This is because the fictional disclosures effectively destroy the novelty of the inventions or render...

Product designs can be protected under all three of the patent, trademark, and copyright laws. This is because product designs comprise original ornamentation, can serve as indicators of source in the marketplace, and constitute works of art in their own right. This paper juxtaposes the three...

Contemporary intellectual property law applications illustrate a very dynamic and rapidly evolving conceptual environment. The proverbial conflict has been between the protection of intellectual creation and the general freedom to create de novo, including expressions of one’s intellect that...

Public lawmakers have inadequate and misaligned incentives to engage in legal innovation. Private lawmaking is offered as a potential solution to this problem. However, private lawmaking faces a dilemma: In order to be effective, the cost-reducing standard forms produced by private lawdrafters...

Public authorities in many jurisdictions are concerned about the proliferation of illegal content and products on online platforms. In this paper, we provide an economic appraisal of platform liability that highlights the effects of a stricter liability rule on several key variables such as...

The intersection of intellectual property and human rights is a relatively new site in the search for balance in intellectual property law and policy. Although this intersection opens up intellectual property to a unique kind of interdisciplinary analysis, only the human rights system appears to...

For more than half a century, courts have viewed certain uses of intellectual property (IP) as misuse, rendering the IP unenforceable until the misuse is purged. The doctrine began with patents, but courts have recently extended it to copyrights. In most cases, it reflects concern over...

In June 2004, the Lancome opinion from the Netherlands held that perfume compositions are copyrightable. The thesis of this paper is that the Dutch Court's approach runs afoul of basic copyright principles. Protecting scents instead would be relatively novel, but hardly radical, and necessary...