Patent law gives patent owners not just the right to prevent others from copying their ideas, but the power to control the use of their idea even by those who independently develop a technology with no knowledge of the patent or the patentee. In an important paper, Samson Vermont challenges this...

Patent law is virtually alone in intellectual property (IP) in punishing independent development. To infringe a copyright or trade secret, defendants must copy the protected IP from the plaintiff, directly or indirectly. But patent infringement requires only that the defendant's product falls...

At the heart of copyright infringement cases is “substantial similarity” between the plaintiff’s and the defendant’s works. But while every circuit agrees on the centrality of substantial similarity, that basic agreement conceals surprising differences in what exactly we mean by...