George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School

Anti-Patent Bias in Applying Injunction Test Results in Another District Court’s Reversal – Aria Diagnostics v. Sequenom (Fed. Cir. Aug. 9, 2013)

[Cross Posted to Truth on the Market]

In its recent decision in Douglas Dynamics v. Buyers Products Co. (Fed. Cir., May 21, 2013), the Federal Circuit was forced to reverse a district court’s abuse of its discretion because the trial judge injected an anti-patent bias into the legal test for determining whether a patent-owner should receive a permanent injunction against an infringer. Read more

The Myth of the “Patent Troll” Litigation Explosion

[Cross posted at Truth on the Market]

In a prior blog posting, I reported how reports of a so-called “patent litigation explosion” today are just wrong.  As I detailed in another blog posting, the percentage of patent lawsuits today are not only consistent with historical patent litigation rates in the nineteenth century, there is actually less litigation today than during some decades in the early nineteenth century. Read more

“Funny Math” Still Infecting Scholarship on Patent Cases in the ITC

Those claiming that we’ve seen an “explosion of patent litigation” in recent years have proven resilient to counterarguments, continuing even to generate questionable “statistics” to buttress their assertions.

Given the Obama Administration’s recent reversal of the International Trade Commission’s exclusion order against Apple in its patent dispute with Samsung, we are hearing once again that there has been an “explosion” of patents cases at the ITC. Read more

The Value of Injunctions – Douglas Dynamics v. Buyers Products Co. (Fed. Cir. May 21, 2013)

The Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Douglas Dynamics, LLC, v. Buyers Products Co. (Fed. Cir. May 21, 2013) is very important given the widespread, albeit mistaken, belief today that the Supreme Court’s decision in eBay v. MercExchange (2005) established that damages and not injunctions are the presumptive remedy for patent infringement.  Read more

Some Recommended Books on Scientists, Inventors and Innovators

I am an avid reader of books about scientists, inventors and innovators.  I’ve been particularly happy about the evolution of the narrative nonfiction genre that has occurred since the publication in 1995 of Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, Dava Sobel’s award-winning book on John Harrison’s invention of the first truly mechanical clock. Read more

A Critique of a Recent Article Which Found That Sequence Patents Cover the Entire Human Genome

By Professor Christopher Holman

[The following is a blog posting by Christopher Holman, a patent law scholar at UMKC School of Law, that he originally posted on April 5, 2013 at his blog, Holman’s Biotech IP Blog, where Professor Holman regularly blogs on important issues in biotech and IP law.  Read more

How Copyright Drives Innovation in Scholarly Publishing

[Cross posted at Truth on the Market]

Today’s public policy debates frame copyright policy solely in terms of a “trade off” between the benefits of incentivizing new works and the social deadweight losses imposed by the access restrictions imposed by these (temporary) “monopolies.” Read more

Summary of Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons by Professor Chris Newman

Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, U.S. Supreme Court, decided March 19, 2013

Chris Newman
Assistant Professor of Law
George Mason University School of Law

This is best described as a decision in which the Court felt compelled to choose between two readings of the Copyright Act, either of which led to unpalatable results.   Read more

The SHIELD Act: When Bad Economic Studies Make Bad Laws

[Cross-Posted at Truth on the Market on March 15, 2013]

Earlier this month, Representatives Peter DeFazio and Jason Chaffetz picked up the gauntlet from President Obama’s comments on February 14 at a Google-sponsored Internet Q&A on Google+ that “our efforts at patent reform only went about halfway to where we need to go” and that he would like “to see if we can build some additional consensus on smarter patent laws.” Read more

Scratching my Head Over the SHIELD Act

By Michael Risch

[The following is a blog posting by Michael Risch, a patent law scholar at Villanova Law School, that he originally posted on March 10, 2013 at the law professor group blog, Madisonian.net, where Professor Risch regularly blogs.  Read more