Post by Yonathan A. Arbel
Continuing Janet Freilich‘s post covering the first day of the consortium, here follows my take on the second day, which was also very successful. I will divide my summary to two separate posts, so wait for updates… In this post I cover the contributions of John Goldberg, Stephen Smith, and Robert Caso and Guilia Dore.
Post by Janet Freilich
On July 6-7, McGill University’s Faculty of Law and Center for Intellectual Property Policy hosted the Third Annual Private Law Consortium, organized by David Lametti. Participants at the Consortium came from Bar-Ilan University, Harvard University, McGill University, the University of Oslo, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Trento. The Consortium spanned a wide variety of private law topics, including property, torts, contracts, and intellectual property.
Post by Janet Freilich
Ted Sichelman has written a response to my earlier post on whether there are too many patents to search. He argues that the problem of patent searching is smaller than I suggested. He includes an excellent critique of Christina Mulligan and Timothy Lee’s article on patent search costs and provides some much needed numbers on the magnitude of search time and costs. I agree with him on many points, but I stand by my conclusion that clearance searches are very difficult, if not impossible.
Post by Ted Sichelman
Updated July 3, 2015
In a recent post on this blog, Janet Freilich asserts that “it is exceedingly difficult (if not impossible) to know if one is infringing a patent.” Freilich further contends that “larger numbers of patents exacerbate this problem,” and approvingly quotes Christina Mulligan and Timothy Lee’s claim that “In software, for example, patent clearance by all firms would require many times more hours of legal research than all patent lawyers in the United States can bill in a year.”
These views generally reflect the academic zeitgeist regarding “search costs” in patent law. However, they do not accord with my own experience. In this regard, I have conducted many hours of patent searches—first, when I founded and ran a venture-backed software company for five years, for which I regularly reviewed patents of competitors; and second, as a practicing attorney, which included reading thousands of patents in many different fields (from software to electronics to medical devices) for “freedom to operate” and prior art purposes.
Post by John M. Golden
In Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC, No. 13-720, slip op. (U.S. S. Ct. June 22, 2015), the U.S. Supreme Court kicked off a momentous week with an opinion highlighting the importance of stare decisis. More particularly, the justices grappled with whether to overrule a half-century-old holding “that a patent holder cannot charge royalties for the use of his invention after its patent term has expired.” Id. at 1. A six-justice majority chose to stick with the prior holding despite what the majority conceded to be a “broad scholarly consensus” criticizing this precedent on economic grounds. Id. at 13. In explanation of the decision, Justice Kagan wrote, inter alia, that (1) “[r]especting stare decisis means sticking to some wrong decisions”; (2) precedent involving interpretation of a statute has “enhanced force” compared to, say, precedent involving an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution; and (3) precedent involving property or contract rights, such as the patent law precedent in question, is further “superpowered” “because parties are especially likely to rely on such precedents when ordering their affairs.” Id. at 7-10. Indeed, according to the Court, “considerations favoring stare decisis are ‘at their acme’” in “‘cases involving property and contract rights.’” Id. at 9 (quoting Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808, 811 (1991) (Rehnquist, C.J.)).
Post by Janet Freilich
Work-arounds (innovations that arise in the course of designing a technology to avoid another inventor’s patent claim) are a long-standing feature of the patent system. The conventional wisdom is that work-arounds are good:
“We have often noted that one of the benefits of the patent system is the incentive it provides for “designing around” patented inventions, thus creating new innovation.”
Read Corp. v. Porter, Inc., 970 F.2d 816, 823 (Fed. Cir. 1992)
But are they?
Post by Dan Kelly
The International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE), soon to be renamed The Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics (SIOE), is hosting its 19th Annual Conference this weekend, June 18-20, at Harvard Law School. The conference website includes details on this year’s program and papers.
The conference is sponsored by Harvard Law School through the Project on the Foundations of Private Law. In addition to keynotes by Martin Nowak (Harvard) on “The Evolution of Cooperation” and Michael Whinston (MIT) on “Property Rights and the Efficiency of Bargaining,” the program includes a number of panels that intersect with private law topics, including agency and fiduciary law, contracts, intellectual property, and property rights.
Post by John M. Golden
In patent law, networked technologies have brought to the fore difficult questions about liability in situations involving so-called “divided infringement.” In a typical such situation, multiple parties contribute to the exploitation of a patented method, but no party performs all steps of the method. Notably for the purposes of this blog, questions about whether anyone is liable for infringement in such situations have led judges at both the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to direct attention to common law standards for joint tortfeasor liability. In the end, more straightforward issues of statutory interpretation might dominate concerns about common law principles. Cf. John F. Duffy & Richard Hynes, Statutory Domain and the Commercial Law of Intellectual Property, 102 Va. L. Rev. (forthcoming) (contending that “modern commentators are wrong in asserting that [patent and copyright] exhaustion doctrine evolved from common-law decisionmaking” as opposed to statutory interpretation) . Nonetheless, the current debate highlights the extent to which modern statutory regimes can trigger reference to (and opportunities for academic guidance on) background principles of common law.
Post by Shyam Balganesh A few weeks ago, the Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, decided the much-anticipated copyright case of Google v. Garcia. The case involved an actress, Cindy Lee Garcia, who was led to believe that she was performing for a film titled Desert Warrior. After her performance was recorded, the producer transformed her five-second … Read more
Post by: John Golden
While we debate the nature of the distinction—or the lack thereof—between public and private law, perhaps we should take note that the U.S. Supreme Court has recently decided the issue. Well, not by a long shot, of course, but in Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. v. Sandoz, Inc., 135 S. Ct. 831 (2015), justices engaged in spirited debate over the extent to which the interpretation of patent claims should be viewed as more analogous to the interpretation of private “written instruments such as deeds and contracts” than to the interpretation of statutes. Id. at 840. The dissenters in Teva explicitly linked this question to a traditional distinction between “‘core’ private rights” and “‘public rights,’” id. at 848 n.2 (Thomas, J., dissenting). The justices viewed these questions as significant for—if not decisive of—whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was right in viewing patent claim construction as a question of law for which appellate review is uniformly de novo even when a lower court’s claim construction reflects underlying factual findings. A seven-justice majority rejected the Federal Circuit’s position. En route to this result, the majority and dissenters produced opinions with snippets that relate to potential ways of distinguishing between public and private law.
Post by Janet Freilich
I often get asked how many U.S. patents exist and are in force. People’s instinct on this varies wildly. So, to celebrate the achievement of a milestone patent number, I wanted to write about the nine millionth U.S. patent, which issued on April 7th, 2015. Dennis Crouch from Patently-O estimates that three million U.S. patents are currently in force, which seems about right to me.
U.S. Patent No. 9,000,000 is titled “Windshield Washer Conditioner” and claims “a system and method of collecting and conditioning rainwater and other moisture, such as dew, from a windshield of a vehicle and utilizing the collected fluid to replenish the fluids in the windshield washer reservoir.” The familiarity and ordinariness of the technology’s application exemplifies the message in John Golden’s recent article that, although we perceive patents as predominantly high-tech,
Post by Shyam Balganesh
Christopher Columbus Langdell is best known as a Legal Formalist who sought to develop an autonomous and deductive approach to legal analysis. Some of his most prominent contributions were in trying to identify the structure of rights and wrongs. Hidden within his body of work is a short five-page paper entitled Patent Rights and Copy Rights (12 Harv. L. Rev. 553 (1899)) where he tries to understand the precise analytical structure of statutory patents and copyrights. Langdell makes a number of interesting points in the paper, but what I found most compelling was his effort to locate the patent and copyright systems (i.e., statutes) within the realm of private law, despite the obvious role of the state in generating and maintaining the system. Here are a few of his observations (p. 554):
Has an author, musical composer, artist, or inventor a property in his literary, musical, or artistic creation, or in his invention, regarded as an incorporeal thing? If he have, this will furnish him with another and effective means of preventing the use and enjoyment of his creation or invention by others without his consent. If such a property exist, it is not created by the State, but is deduced as a consequence of the creation or invention. If such a property does not exist otherwise, doubtless it might be created by the State; but it is believed that no State ever has created such a property.
Post by John Golden
Private law mavens might have interest in two patent cases that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has taken en banc. In SCA Hygiene Products Aktiebolag v. First Quality Baby Products, LLC, No. 2013-1564 (Fed. Cir. Dec. 30, 2014) (en banc), the Federal Circuit will review precedent indicating that the defense of laches is available “to bar a claim for damages based on patent infringement occurring within [a] six-year damages limitation period” set by the U.S. Patent Act. In Lexmark International, Inc. v. Impression Products, Inc., Nos. 2014-1617, 2014-1619 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 14, 2015) (en banc), the Federal Circuit will review additional precedent involving the doctrine of patent exhaustion, a doctrine under which, in the Supreme Court’s words, “the initial authorized sale of a patented item terminates all patent rights to that item.” Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., 553 U.S. 617, 625 (2008).