As scholars who write in intellectual property (“IP”), we write this letter with aspirations of reaching the highest ethical norms possible for our field. In particular, we have noted an influx of large contributions from corporate and private actors who have an economic stake in ongoing...

Human behavior stems from a fascinating tangle of conscious and subconscious impulses. While we are often quite aware of what we are doing and how we have come to do it, such is not always the case. Various human drives can lead us, for example, to be perfectly convinced that our actions are...

Intellectual property has become a pervasive presence in society. Seeping into every nook and cranny of American life, intellectual property casts a protective haze over everything from the words of an email, to the shape of a phone, to the sequence of our genes. Increasingly, these rights are...

Fledgling efforts exist to establish open-source projects in biotechnology. Following copyleft, participants agree that advances in the technology must remain as openly available as the original technology. Such agreements implicate patent misuse, which is defined as an impermissible attempt to...

The Fifth Amendment’s Compensation Clause contains only a few simple words. Yet, the only consensus that academics and judges consistently reach on the clause is that there is no consensus. Caselaw and scholarship on the clause continue to develop with a remarkable lack of dialogue with...

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...

The confluence of two significant developments in modern patent practice leads me to write a paper with such a provocative title. The first development is the rise of hold-up as a primary component of patent litigation and patent licensing. The second development in the last three decades is the...

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...

A number of doctrines in modern copyright and patent law attempt to strike some balance between the rights of original developers and the rights of subsequent improvers. Both patents and copyrights are limited in duration and in scope. Each of these limitations provides some freedom of action to...