Non-Faculty Presenters at IPSC

The annual IP Scholars Conference is this week at Berkeley, and it includes over 150 presenters and up to six parallel tracks of presentations. The conference includes talks by Chief Judge Diane Wood of the 7th Circuit, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit, Shira Perlmutter of the PTO, and Colleen Chien of the OSTP, as well as an impressive array of academics. But one of the goals of this blog is to highlight the work of less "famous" scholars, so here are some of the works by non-faculty presenters that I noticed (check the speaker list for links to their full abstracts or papers):

• Jonathan Ashtor (Skadden): Studied each patent held valid and infringed in district court 2006-11 (400 patents, 300 cases), with the goal of understanding the factors driving enforcement value.
• Megan Blakely (Postdoc, Glasgow): Discusses the history of IP protection for tartan.
• Yan Feng (FTC): "Fair music" claims (e.g., "because we aren't evil, fully 50% of your membership goes straight to the musicians") should be recognized as "process advertising" to allow policing of misleading statements.
• Joseph Fishman (Climenko Fellow, Harvard): Copyright's constraint on ability to use works actually has a "generative upside" that promotes creativity.
• Andrew Gilden (Grey Fellow, Stanford): Courts' focus on whether preexisting works were used as "raw materials" is distributionally and ethically troubling.
• Patrick Goold (IP Fellow, Chicago-Kent): Because of fair use, copyright is a fault-based tort, not a strict-liability tort.
• Brad Greenberg (IP Fellow, Columbia): Technology neutrality in copyright law is often self-defeating, and the goals of technology neutrality are better served by making the law technology specific.
• Erik Hovenkamp (JD and econ PhD candidate, Northwestern): Equilibrium strategy in a model of patent assertion with low-quality patents is to follow through on threats of seemingly irrational litigation.
• Camilla Hrdy (IP Fellow, Penn): US already has a system for promoting private sector commercialization of inventions that does not require creating new exclusive rights: direct financing through "commercialization awards."
• Dmitry Karshtedt (Law & Biosciences Fellow, Stanford): Courts have imposed "completeness requirement" based on hodgepodge of doctrines; should recognize in new statutory provision and create new "research patent" for claims that meet other standards but fail completeness.
• Shawn Miller (Lecturer & Fellow, Stanford; co-author: Mark Lemley): District court judges are less likely to be reversed by the Federal Circuit after they sit with that court by designation, and the effect appears to be due to trust rather than learning.
• Rachel Sachs (Petrie-Flom Fellow, Harvard): Allowing liability for divided infringement of medical method patents could have negative effects on innovation and healthcare.
• Neel Sukhatme (econ PhD candidate, Princeton): The PTO can and should charge different prices for patents in different industries; see Table 2 on last page of article for proposed prices.
• Xiyin Tang (Skadden; Visiting Fellow at Yale ISP): Use of a work that is not unique enough to parody should be analyzed under genericide, not fair use.
• Saurabh Vishnubhakat (Postdoc, Duke): Courts do not treat direct patent infringement as a strict liability tort in practice; this article provides framework to explain best approach to intent.
• Robert Walker (Donahue Fitzgerald; Affiliate Scholar at Hastings): Courts variously use three largely incompatible theories when making aesthetic judgments in copyright, leading to a doctrinal mess; instead, they should adopt uniform approach.

Are there other works that caught your eye (including works by faculty presenters)? Leave a note in the comments, or let me know on Twitter (@PatentScholar).