George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School

Teleforum Panel on End-User Lawsuits in Patent Law on August 29 (free and open to the public)

End-User Lawsuits in Patent Litigation: A Bug or a Feature of Patent Law?
A Teleforum Panel
(Free and Open to the Public)

Thursday, August 29, 2013
Noon – 1pm (EST)

In the patent policy debates today, one issue that has proven a flash point of controversy is patent infringement lawsuits against consumers and retailers, such as coffee shops, JC Penney, and others.  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

Guest Post by Wayne Sobon: A Line in the Sand on the Calls for New Patent Legislation

On June 9-11, the IP Business Congress sponsored by Intellectual Asset Magazine (IAM) hosted a debate on the resolution: “This house believes that the America Invents Act should be a legislative line in the sand and that no more reform of the US patent system is needed.” 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

Patented Innovation and Patent Wars: Some Historical Perspective

[This was originally posted at IBM’s A Smarter Planet Blog on January 11, 2013.]

The America Invents Act (AIA) was signed into law in September 2011, and it is rightly recognized as “the most significant reform of the U.S. patent system since 1836.”  Read more