Category: Intellectual property and its discontents
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I'm very pleased to be able to say that my new book, The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property, now has a publisher's webpage on Cambridge UP! It's currently in production, and should be coming out this winter. Here's the blurb from the site: "As a central part of the regulation of contemporary economies, intellectual property (IP)…
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By Gordon Hull The Supreme Court just granted cert in an important trademark case, in re Brunetti. The case concerns whether Eric Brunetti can get federal trademark registration for his FUCT line of clothing. Although Brunetti can of course market the clothing in any case, and can claim common law trademark rights, federal registration confers…
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By Gordon Hull The Supreme Court issued a landmark patent ruling yesterday in Oil States v. Greene. The most recent major revision to the Patent statute specifies that the validity of patents – in terms of whether they meet conditions of patentability (utility, non-obviousness and novelty – the opinion does not directly specify whether questions…
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By Gordon Hull In “Intellectual Property’s Leviathan,” Amy Kapczynski argues that both advocates of strong IP protection, and critics from the creative-commons (CC) side tend to view the state in the same way: “both those who defend robust private IP law and their most prominent critics … typically describe the state in its first instance…
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By Gordon Hull This sounds like a trick question, but it’s not. It’s also currently before the Supreme Court, about which more in a moment. First, however, let me summarize the case for why IP isn’t really “property” in the ordinary sense, even if we use the word. In a paper from a little more…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I introduced the exchange between Mark Lemley and Robert Merges on IP theory, and made the initial case that Lemley is essentially arguing for the theoretical primacy of neoliberal biopower in intellectual property. Merges, as will hopefully become evident below, is more interested in grounding IP in juridical notions of…
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By Gordon Hull A couple of years ago, Mark Lemley, one of the most influential and prolific of intellectual property scholars, published his “Faith-Based Intellectual Property,” a manifesto against what he characterizes as non-utilitarian or non-empirical theories of intellectual property. In other words, “participants on both sides of the IP debates are increasingly staking out…
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The Supreme Court ruled unanimously today (well, an opinion and a concurrence) that a provision in the Lanham Act banning “disparaging” trademarks violated the First Amendment. In the case in question, an Asian-American musician named Simon Tam had attempted to register his band’s name, “The Slants,” in a clear effort to reclaim the slur. The…
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In another chapter of its ongoing battle with the Federal Circuit (and the second in a week), the Supreme Court (SCOTUS, I will refer to the Federal Circuit as the CAFC) ruled last Tuesday in Impression Products v. Lexmark International that the sale of a patented product “exhausts” the patent-holder’s claim to derive patent revenue…
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Patent law seems like an easy place to talk about biopower. After all, it has been possible to patent life forms for some time now, and large numbers of patents are issued for products that directly affect life, as in the case of pharmaceuticals and other medical innovations. Biopolitical implications of patent law are thus…
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