On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential...

The Federal Trade Commission's 2003 innovation report revealed an interesting fact: the pharmaceutical industry is largely satisfied with today's patent system while the electronics, software and Internet industries are not. This article suggests that a difference in governing law accounts for...

This short paper explains how two time-honored principles of tort law - proximate cause and culpability - might clarify and rationalize the law of secondary liability for intellectual-property (IP) infringement. It begins by analyzing how Judge Cardozo's classic opinion in Palsgraf used these...

Adopted in 1998 as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. Section 1201 prohibits circumventing technological "locks" on copyrighted works and providing others with means to do so. So far four federal courts of appeals have addressed it. The first case involved the section's...

For the first time ever, the Supreme Court's seminal decision in Grokster permits the theory of secondary liability in copyright law to be rationalized. That case confirmed two important principles: (1) that secondary liability in copyright is a matter of federal common law; and (2) that, unlike...

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...

The Hatch-Waxman Act was intended to encourage makers of generic drugs to seek early entry into drug markets controlled by patents, in part by challenging the patents before they expire. Some patentees have settled these challenges by agreeing to pay the challengers tens or hundreds of millions...

The Supreme Court astonished copyright and music-industry lawyers by deciding the Grokster file-sharing case unanimously in the industry's favor. The parties and some 61 distinguished amici (including the United States, two Senators and one State) had argued the case largely on the basis of...

Congress adopted Section 1201 in 1998, as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, in order to protect copyrighted works from digital piracy and unauthorized use. The section seeks to achieve that goal by outlawing circumventing technological measures (such as encryption and password...

With the recent rejection of the last holdout state's objections to the federal settlement in Microsoft IV, the last shoe appears to have dropped in this mammoth litigation. After all the dust had settled, Microsoft had essentially written its own remedy, albeit under considerable pressure. This...