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...
In the summer of 2015 amidst the beginnings of the 2016 presidential campaign, historic Supreme Court decisions, and regular reports of protests, some might have missed the copyright angle to the Ashley Madison story. In fact, many may have missed the Ashley M...
The impact of modern technology cannot be overstated; it has quickly impacted the lives of most Americans in a relatively short amount of time. In 2012, 78% of Americans reported owning a desktop or laptop computer. In 2014, 64% of Americans stated that they o...