What are the benefits of means-plus-function claiming? Claims written this way allow the patentee to describe their invention in terms of a “step” or “means” for performing a specified function without limiting the patent scope to the specific structures discl...
No one entity is in charge of the Internet, yet it works. The functioning of the Internet is maintained by an amalgamation of technological architectures, standards (and standards bodies) and task specific institutions, that are referred to as the Internet gov...
Employee covenants not to disclose and not to use confidential information without authorization are widely used to protect employer trade secrets and other confidential information. However, the covenants are not as routinely enforced as many believe. At a mi...
Legally, libraries and archives may make and distribute copies of works in the last twenty years of their copyright, as long as there is no normal commercial exploitation of the work(s) and no reasonably priced copy available. 17 U.S.C. § 108(h). Unfortunately...
Patents are notoriously complex. Unsurprisingly, litigation involving patents shares its subject matter’s innate intricacies. In the face of rising patent filings and increasingly complicated patent infringement lawsuits, Congress created the Patent Pilot Prog...
Stealing music is legal again. On June 2, 2016, in VMG Salsoul, LLC v. Ciccone, the Ninth Circuit held that a sampled horn hit in Madonna’s “Vogue” was de minimis, infringing on neither the composition nor the recording of its source. The Ninth thus split from...
Trade secret theft in the United States is a serious problem, and criminal penalties exist for this misconduct in both federal and state statutes. For twenty years, the literature in this area has focused almost entirely on the federal statute, the Economic Es...
Determining which patents are valuable can seem a lot like picking winning lottery numbers. There were, as of 2014, approximately 2.5 million U.S. patents in force. The number of new patent applications has risen steadily to more than 411,728 each year, and if...
The U.S. Supreme Court has decided an increasing number of intellectual property (IP) cases—especially patent cases—over the last several terms. Which prior cases influence the stated reasoning in these recent Supreme Court IP cases? A handful of citation stud...
In his 1942 short story, “Runaround,” Isaac Asimov set forth three “laws” for robots: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such order...
Congress, while enacting at least six major revisions to patent law since 1793, has left the definition of patentable subject matter essentially unchanged. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, has been uncomfortable with the concept for more than a century. D...
The Fourth Amendment’s Third Party Doctrine has recently been extended to cover a person’s interest in their digital information. This has allowed more data to become accessible to government agencies than ever before. Under this doctrine, as soon as digital i...