One of the underlying justifications of the patent system is to encourage dissemination of scientific knowledge and promote innovation. Yet, the patent system is not a green card to innovation. Indeed, given our progress in science and the increasing rate of technological developments it is...

In their seminal 1972 article, "Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral," Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed proposed an analytic framework for comparing entitlements protected by property rules and liability rules. Their article has become one of the...

Section 292 of the Patent Act forbids the false marking of unpatented or infringing articles with the type of marks usually used by patentees to provide public notice of their patented inventions. Prior to the recent enactment of patent reform, the statute provided a rare qui tam enforcement...

Switzerland is about to implement a completely new patent litigation system, following the establishment of a new specialized federal patent trial court and the replacement of twenty-six cantonal codes of civil procedure with a single uniform federal code of civil procedure. This article...

Patent protection for genetic enhancements would tend to spur genetic innovation, but would tend to limit access to those genetic enhancements through discriminatory mechanisms such as price and favoritism. The patent system would likely ensure high rates of genetic enhancement innovation,...

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, all countries having patent systems required patentable inventions to be both new and useful. Now those two fundamental requirements have been joined by a third: Patentable inventions must also be nonobvious. The nonobviousness requirement is...

An “invention,” as used in the United States patent laws, refers to anything made by man that employs or harnesses a law of nature or a naturally occurring substance for human benefit. A watermill, for instance, harnesses the power of gravity to run machinery. But legal methods, such as tax...

Since the mapping of the human genome and the technical innovations in the field of biotechnology, patent law has gone through great controversies. Protection is required for an investor to make an investment but how broad should the given protection be? Whether the invention is a micro-organism...

For several years, courts have been improperly calculating damages in cases involving the unlicensed use of genetically-modified (GM) seed technology. In particular, when courts determine patent damages based on the hypothetical negotiation method, they err in exaggerating these damages to a...