Earlier this month, I wrote about the first part of the of the trial between Oracle and Google. I predicted that the Court would eventually rule that the elements of Java that were copied were functional, and thus not infringed. There’s been no ruling on that point, but the show went on, with a trial [...]

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I am excited to announce that Oxford University Press has published my book, Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources. I owe a huge debt to my Madisonian colleagues for their support along the way. I will post more about the book in the next few weeks, but here are some links and a short [...]

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Most law professors hold citation by the Supreme Court as a lofty goal. The best result would be adoption of a proposal made in an article, but most academics would settle for square consideration of a proposal, even if rejected. And then there’s the middle ground, when you can’t really tell if you’ve been accepted [...]

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On behalf of the editors of JOLTI at Case Western Reserve, some readers may be interested in the following:
Call For Submissions
Case Western Reserve’s Journal of Law, Technology & the Internet is searching for a final article to publish in its spring edition. Any scholarly work related to cyber law, intellectual property law [...]

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The Supreme Court heard oral argument in Mayo v. Prometheus Labs.  The case will hopefully provide some guidance on the patenting of medical diagnostics, but because the patent suffers from some real drawbacks, I’m not so sure.  I’ll explain why below. If you are interested in more detail, my 2008 article “Everything is Patentable” discusses [...]

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The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act was signed into law a month ago by President Obama, after the Senate ultimately accepted the House version of the bill. When signing, Obama noted that he had “asked Congress to send me a bill that reforms the outdated patent process, a bill that cuts away the red [...]

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Yesterday, Mark Cuban, the very visible(, entrepreneurial, notorious) owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Chairman of HDNet, weighed in on patent reform.  His comments were posted on The Huffington Post here.

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As I noted in prior posts on this blog, a key conclusion of my forthcoming article Patent Troll Myths is that patent plaintiffs that don’t make anything – pejoratively called “trolls,” get their patents from many companies that did attempt to make something (or from individuals). Thus, I argue that trolls are a mirror of [...]

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This week, the Supreme Court issued a nearly unanimous opinion in Global-Tech Appliances v. SEB, a case dealing with an issue so seemingly unimportant (to me, at least) that I had forgotten it was even on the docket. In short, the Court held 8-1 that inducing patent infringement required knowledge of the patent.
Well, duh. Proof [...]

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I’ve often wondered whether it is technically correct to refer to intellectual property infringement as a species of tort law.  We tend not to equate torts with IP in common parlance, but there are certainly similarities, notably with property-based torts like trespass and conversion.  Maybe we don’t use the tort terminology because it runs up [...]

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The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals recently decided an important patent civil procedure case (en banc) about the scope of injunctions. Tivo obtained an injunction against Echostar in a long-running patent infringement case relating to DVR software. The injunction included two features:
1. Don’t distribute any new products that infringe, and
2. Disable recording in a particular list [...]

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Congratulations to Cynthia Ho on publication of her new book with OUP, Access to Medicine in the Global Economy:  International Agreements on Patents and Related Rights. An important addition to the international IP literature…

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[cross-posted at Prawfsblawg]
My study of non-practicing patent plaintiffs was sparked by a discussion with a colleague about where patent trolls come from. My theory was that patent trolls tended to enforce patents that startups obtained, but that lay fallow when the startups lost funding. Unfortunately, I had no data to back up my intuition, nor [...]

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[cross-posted at Prawfsblawg]
I plan to write a couple posts about my forthcoming article called Patent Troll Myths.  The article is a culmination of two years of data gathering and analysis from many different sources.
But first, how can we assess myths about patent trolls  if we don’t know what they are? There are two ways people [...]

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Press release here.
Congratulations, Mary!  It’s very well deserved.

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For patent folks interested in some comparative reading, the Australian federal court just handed down a decision clarifying the “novelty” requirements in the Australian patent statute.  Full text decision can be found here.

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J.C. Penney was on top of the web world last holiday season, showing up at #1 for dozens of retail search queries on Google. Type “dresses,” “area rugs,” “bedding:” you’d get Penney’s items as your first search result. Had the venerable retailer become a “Wikipedia” of online shopping, reliably providing the “people’s choice?” [...]

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I spent the last couple of days at the Stanford Law Review symposium called The Future of Patents: Bilski and Beyond. I moderated one panel while Mark Lemley presented our article Life After Bilski, which Mark, Ted Sichelman, Polk Wagner, and I wrote. It will be published in the Stanford Law Review’s symposium issue. (If [...]

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I have a new paper up at SSRN:  “Beyond Invention: Patent as Knowledge Law.”
The abstract:
The decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Bilski v. Kappos, concerning the legal standard for determining patentable subject matter under the American Patent Act, is used as a starting point for a brief review of historical, philosophical, [...]

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Thanks to Mike and all the other folks for having me here- I look forward to being a regular contributor.  For my first post, I want to note a few lawsuits filed by Intellectual Ventures, probably the largest (by patent holdings) “non-practicing entity” (or NPE, or more pejoratively “patent troll”). Thanks to Dennis Crouch for [...]

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