The Supreme Court today issued its much-awaited decision in the Myriad Technologies case. At issue in the case were Myriad’s patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes — genes which are important genetic markers for determining susceptibility to breast cancer. Myriad discovered “the precise location” of the two genes (on chromosomes 17 and 13), and […]
Archive | Patent Law
State of Vermont v. Alleged Patent Troll
The case is State v. MPHJ Technology Investments Corp. (Vt. Super. Ct. filed May 8, 2013); GigaOM reports: In a complaint filed in Vermont’s Superior Court, the state accuses MPHJ Technology — which operates 40 shell companies through a UPS store in Delaware — of violating consumer protection law by demanding small businesses buy a […]
The Knockoff Economy: Thanks! And Some Responses to Reader Comments . . .
By Prof. Christopher Sprigman (Virginia), guest-blogging on October 19, 2012 2:35 pm in Copyright, Patent Law
This is our last post guest-blogging at the VC and we again want to thank our hosts. A lot of interesting comments came in, and we’ll use this final post to address some of the issues and questions raised by readers. In no particular order: Innovation vs. Variation. A few comments argued that a lot […]
The Knockoff Economy and the Power of Performance and Brands
By Prof. Christopher Sprigman (Virginia), guest-blogging on October 18, 2012 7:35 am in Copyright, Patent Law
In our last post, we discussed a variety of industries in which we see creativity without much resort to patent or copyright law. And we offered some explanations for how low-IP creativity works, such as informal social norms and first mover advantage. In today’s post, we look at a couple of additional ways in which […]
The Knockoff Economy in Finance, Football, and More
By Prof. Christopher Sprigman (Virginia), guest-blogging on October 17, 2012 8:00 am in Copyright, Patent Law
In our first two posts, we wrote a bit about how two important creative industries, fashion and cuisine, do very well without much intellectual property. Notice that we wrote “without much” IP, and not “without any”. That’s because there is some IP that’s relevant to both. The fashion industry makes heavy use of trademark law […]
The Knockoff Economy: Copying and Creativity in Cuisine
By Prof. Christopher Sprigman (Virginia), guest-blogging on October 16, 2012 8:00 am in Copyright, Patent Law, Popular Culture
Yesterday we introduced some of the big themes of The Knockoff Economy, and briefly explained why the fashion industry remains so creative despite having its central product—clothing designs—freely copied by any firm that thinks it can turn it a profit by aping an original design. In the book we look at several other examples of […]
The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation
By Prof. Christopher Sprigman (Virginia), guest-blogging on October 15, 2012 10:58 am in Copyright, Patent Law, Trademark
First, many thanks to Eugene and the rest of the VC team for inviting us to guest-blog this week. The Knockoff Economy is about copying, and specifically about how copying, copyright, and creativity mix in a set of somewhat unusual industries—from fashion to food to football. Though our main focus is copyright, we also talk […]
Borat Prior Art Leads to Rejection of Patent Application
So reports IP Watchdog, with photos. Thanks to Victor Steinbok for the pointer.
Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Labs Reversed
The opinion is here; congratulations to my Mayer Brown LLP colleagues Stephen Shapiro, Timothy Bishop, Jeffrey Sarles, and Charles Rothfeld, and to Fish & Richardson’s Jonathan Singer, John Dragseth, and Deanna Reiche, all of whom represented the winning side, Mayo. For more on the case, see the SCOTUSblog page.
Standards of Review in Patent Law: A Comment on Kappos v. Hyatt
In Kappos v. Hyatt, to be argued on January 9th, the Supreme Court will consider the standards of review in Section 145 patent proceedings brought in federal district court. You can read Ronald Mann’s preview of the case here at SCOTUSBlog. As it happens, I wrote a law review article on patent law standards of […]
A Good Term for the Federal Circuit on Patent Law
Going into this Term, the Federal Circuit had a fairly unenviable record—virtually every one of its judgments under review had been reversed or vacated since January 2008. The sole exception, last Term’s Bilski v. Kappos, was nominally an affirmance, but because basically no one on the Court agreed with the Federal Circuit’s rationale, “it did […]
Mayo Collaborative Servs. v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc.
I blogged about this case a couple of years ago, and saw that some readers were interested in it; so I thought I’d post an update on it, since it’s coming up to the Court again. As my Mayer Brown LLP colleagues and I say in the petition for certiorari, This case concerns whether a […]
Gene Patent(s?) Invalidated:
When I teach the patent law material in my Introductory Intellectual Property class, we discuss the (very fundamental) principle that “naturally-occurring” things are not patentable subject matter – that patents only cover creations springing from the human mind. “But wait a second,” someone often asks, “what about all those ‘gene patents’ I read about in […]