Fagundes & Perzanowski: A new framework for conceptualizing the end of IP rights

 Dave Fagundes and Aaron Perzanowski have just posted a very interesting and thought-provoking paper draft on SSRN called "How Intellectual Property Ends."  

The paper, which follows up on their prior work on copyright abandonment, closely examines how IP rights come to an end through doctrines like "expiration," "forfeiture," or "abandonment." The paper seeks to provide a “taxonomy” for thinking about how IP rights end. The authors argue that imprecise or inconsistent uses of terms like "abandonment" and "forfeiture” deprives these terms of meaning and “obscures the underlying logic” of the doctrines as originally developed at common law (5). They instead posit a single unified framework for consistently conceiving of termination that can work across the four IP regimes. 

Buccafusco, Masur, & Varadarajan: Does Trade Secrecy Have an "Information Paradox"?

One of the key purposes of trade secret law is to address the "Arrow information paradox." The information paradox posits that there is a fundamental challenge in information exchange: It is difficult to assess the value of information without first sharing it, but once the information is shared, it becomes vulnerable to being copied, leaving the originator without compensation and without a competitive advantage.