Monthly Archives: January, 2024
Daanish Naithani, ‘Cross-jurisdictional analysis of the standard of inventive step in patent law: Through a study of the CRISPR Cas gene editing technology in the biotechnology industry’
ABSTRACT Patent law serves an important economic function: to increase or reduce economic welfare. In the presence of economic justifications favoring creation of property rights in inventions, one needs to understand that there are also significant social costs involved. But in the present, it is not entirely clear whether the patent system has been able […]
Bram Akkermans, ‘The Influence of the Four (or Five) Freedoms on Property Law’
ABSTRACT The European Union is built upon a single market, a conglomerate of national markets that is governed by multiple levels of law. European Union law comprises two treaties and provides regulation in the form of Regulations and Directives. EU Law also provides a set of prohibitions that govern trade on the single market. In […]
‘Illustrating Rent: Why Is The Tenant Falling?’
Sarah Schindler and Kellen Zale, ‘The Anti-Tenancy Doctrine’, 171 University of Pennsylvania Law Review (forthcoming 2023), available at SSRN. In their forthcoming article, ‘The Anti-Tenancy Doctrine’, Sarah Schindler and Kellen Zale proclaim, ‘The law has failed tenants’. The authors then provide solid evidence of that failure and identify a concept they call the Anti-Tenancy Doctrine. […]
Lucas Lixinski, ‘Intellectual Property and Intangible Heritage’
ABSTRACT This chapter addresses the ways in which intellectual property can be used to redress cultural harm. It argues that intellectual property offers the strongest form of protection, but it easily commodifies and ossifies heritage. The chapter looks at how copyright (including moral rights), trademarks, trade secrets, appellations of origin, and industrial designs can be […]
Bart Wilson, ‘Property Rights Aren’t Primary; Ideas Are’
ABSTRACT The current approach to the study of property cannot distinguish the causes of human action from the consequences of human action. It also cordons off morality thereby opening a hole in how property rights work. The scientific difficulty is that our analysis must constantly shift between the individual, their local community, and the larger […]
Hiroko Onishi, ‘“I Am Internet Famous!”: Protecting a New Form of “Celebrities” in the Law of Passing Off’
ABSTRACT The main purpose of this paper is to explore the efficacy of the law of passing off as a mechanism to provide legal protection for the ‘status’ of so-called ‘celebrities’. In doing so, the author explores the legal position of a new form of celebrities – those who have achieved the status of celebrities […]
Michaela Morrissey, ‘Copyright Takes to the Streets: Protecting Graffiti Under the Visual Artists Rights Act’
ABSTRACT Artists who choose the streets as their canvas – whether to beautify neighborhoods, spark political protest, or merely mark their territory – are faced with uncertainties when it comes to questions of copyright protection for their work. Prior to Castillo v G&M Realty LP, the rights granted to street artists had generally been uncharted […]
Michael Risch, ‘From Patents to Secrets’
ABSTRACT Beginning in 2010, the US Supreme Court limited the type of inventions that were patentable. In the aftermath of these limits, patent plaintiffs began to lose cases – especially software patent cases – in a way they had not before. Commentators predicted that, faced with waning patent protection, inventors would look to trade secrecy […]
Tal Morse and Michael Birnhack, ‘The Continuity Principle of Digital Remains’
ABSTRACT The digitization of social interactions and daily activities means that multiple aspects of our daily lives are documented and stored, and social interactions leave digital traces. The accumulated data does not evaporate upon death, and questions about posthumous privacy and impression management arise. Drawing on eight focus groups comprised of Israeli internet users from […]
‘Copilot: The next stage in the AI copyright wars?’
The copyright wars are back, and this time the conflict is all about artificial intelligence. While most of the public has been paying attention to what is going on with AI art tools such as DALL-E, the current stage of AI development started with text tools, particularly GPT-3 and the code-writing marvel that is Github’s […]