Non-Faculty IPSC Presenters

The annual IP Scholars Conference is at DePaul this August, and the abstracts of accepted papers have been posted. According to the latest updates to the conference website, there are 137 presenters, and 19 of us do not have tenure-track faculty positions. What are the other non-faculty presenters currently doing?

Jacob Sherkow: Negativing Invention

Does nonobviousness favor "flash of genius" inventions over laborious ones, despite Congress's explicit declaration that "[p]atentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made"? Jacob Sherkow argues that it does in his forthcoming article, Negativing Invention. Sherkow is currently an E.D.N.Y. clerk, and before law school he received an M.A. in Biotechnology, a background that shines in his discussions of the inventive process in different disciplines.

Top 10 New IP Paper Downloads

What are the most downloaded IP papers that were posted on SSRN in the past 60 days? There are five new papers on the list since I posted it last month, though Rantanen & Petherbridge's Therasense article still reigns after having two Patently-O blog posts.

Why Isn't IP on the Bar Exam?

I'm studying for the NY bar this summer, which means I spend every morning as a BARBRI girl, watching helpful reviews of things like the difference between possibilities of reverter and vested remainders subject to total divestment, or all the elements of all the different crimes you might commit by killing someone in New York vs. at common law vs. under majority statutory rules. (Fellow bar studiers: I've found Anki to be a great flashcard program.) But one thing I am not studying is the subject I focused on most in law school—intellectual property law—because it is not tested in NY, or in any other jurisdiction that I'm aware of. Why is this?

Katherine Strandburg: Patent Fair Use 2.0

In 2000, Dean Maureen O'Rourke (BU Law) published Toward a Doctrine of Patent Fair Use in the Columbia Law Review, in which she argued that patent law, like copyright, should have a fair use doctrine. The idea hasn't caught on in the past decade, but Professor Katherine Strandburg (NYU Law) has now updated the idea in Patent Fair Use 2.0.