Statute v. Constitution as IP Limiting Doctrine

In his forthcoming article, "Paths or Fences: Patents, Copyrights, and the Constitution," Derek Bambauer (Arizona), notices (and provides some data to support) a discrepancy in how boundary and limiting issues are handled in patent and copyright. He notes that, for reasons he theorizes, big copyright issues are often "fenced in" by the Constitution - that is the constitution limits what can be protected. But patent issues are often resolved by statute, because the Constitution creates a "path" which Congress may follow. Thus, he notes, we have two types of IP emanating from the same source, but treated differently for unjustifiable reasons.

The article is forthcoming in Iowa Law Review, and is posted on SSRN. The abstract is here:

Congressional power over patents and copyrights flows from the same constitutional source, and the doctrines have similar missions. Yet the Supreme Court has approached these areas from distinctly different angles. With copyright, the Court readily employs constitutional analysis, building fences to constrain Congress. With patent, it emphasizes statutory interpretation, demarcating paths the legislature can follow, or deviate from (potentially at its constitutional peril). This Article uses empirical and quantitative analysis to show this divergence. It offers two potential explanations, one based on entitlement strength, the other grounded in public choice concerns. Next, the Article explores border cases where the Court could have used either fences or paths, demonstrating the effects of this pattern. It sets out criteria that the Court should employ in choosing between these approaches: countermajoritarian concerns, institutional competence, pragmatism, and avoidance theory. The Article argues that the key normative principle is that the Court should erect fences when cases impinge on intellectual property’s core constitutional concerns – information disclosure for patent and information generation for copyright. It concludes with two examples where the Court should alter its approach based on this principle.

The article is an interesting theory piece that has some practical payoff.

Evidence on Polarization in IP

Since my coblogger Lisa Ouellette has not tooted her own horn about this, I thought I would do so for her. She, Maggie Wittlin (Nebraska), and Greg Mandel (Temple, its Dean, no less) have a new article forthcoming in UC Davis L. Rev. called What Causes Polarization on IP Policy? A draft is on SSRN, and the abstract is here:

Polarization on contentious policy issues is a problem of national concern for both hot-button cultural issues such as climate change and gun control and for issues of interest to more specialized constituencies. Cultural debates have become so contentious that in many cases people are unable to agree even on the underlying facts needed to resolve these issues. Here, we tackle this problem in the context of intellectual property law. Despite an explosion in the quantity and quality of empirical evidence about the intellectual property system, IP policy debates have become increasingly polarized. This disagreement about existing evidence concerning the effects of the IP system hinders democratic deliberation and stymies progress.

Based on a survey of U.S. IP practitioners, this Article investigates the source of polarization on IP issues, with the goal of understanding how to better enable evidence-based IP policymaking. We hypothesized that, contrary to intuition, more evidence on the effects of IP law would not resolve IP disputes but would instead exacerbate them. Specifically, IP polarization might stem from "cultural cognition," a form of motivated reasoning in which people form factual beliefs that conform to their cultural predispositions and interpret new evidence in light of those beliefs. The cultural cognition framework has helped explain polarization over other issues of national concern, but it has never been tested in a private-law context.

Our survey results provide support for the influence of cultural cognition, as respondents with a relatively hierarchical worldview are more likely to believe strong patent protection is necessary to spur innovation. Additionally, having a hierarchical worldview and also viewing patent rights as property rights may be a better predictor of patent strength preferences than either alone. Taken together, our findings suggest that individuals' cultural preferences affect how they understand new information about the IP system. We discuss the implications of these results for fostering evidence-based IP policymaking, as well as for addressing polarization more broadly. For example, we suggest that empirical legal studies borrow from medical research by initiating a practice of advance registration of new projects-in which the planned methodology is publicly disclosed before data are gathered-to promote broader acceptance of the results.

This work follows Lisa's earlier essay on Cultural Cognition in IP.  I think this is a fascinating and interesting area, and it is certainly seems to be more salient as stakes have increased. I am not without my own priors, but I do take pride in having my work cited by both sides of the debate.

The abstract doesn't do justice to the results - the paper is worth a read, with some interesting graphs as well. One of the more interesting findings is that political party has almost no correlation with views on copyright, but relatively strong correlation with views on patenting. This latter result makes me an odd duck, as I lean more (way, in some cases) liberal but have also leaned more pro-patent than many of my colleagues. I think there are reasons for that, but we don't need to debate them here.

In any event, there is a lot of work in this paper that the authors tie to cultural cognition - that is, motivated reasoning based on priors. I don't have an opinion on the measures they use to define it, but they seem reasonable enough and they follow a growing literature in this area. I think anyone interested in current IP debates (or cranky about them) could learn a few things from this study.

Do Non-Compete Agreements Really Impede Innovation?

I spent my entire practice career in California, representing clients who were, by and large, free to move from company to company due California's ban on covenants not to compete. At the time, the question of inevitable disclosure was unsettled in California; the law allowed for injunctions to stop "threatened" misappropriation, but the question was whether merely being in the same business is a sufficient threat. Most people though no, and the courts eventually went there.

But employees were not always free to do as they wished. I represented many employees against their awful former employers who (wrongfully) claimed that the employee had exited with trade secrets. And I represented many companies against their awful former employees who (wrongfully) claimed they had exited cleanly without trade secrets. For this reason, I've always bristled at the notion that California is a place where everyone happily moves from company to company and nobody cares or legitimately worries about trade secrets because it's all good.

But through this all, I always thought employee mobility was a good thing. I still do. And so do a lot of other people. Indeed, a sort of orthodoxy has arisen where you simply can't be honest, pro-innovation, and pro-noncompete all at the same time. It's as if an entire strand of the literature on how non-competes can improve investments in human capital training got lost in the mix, replaced by theory that says the contrary. This theory is supported by evidence from empirical studies on the matter. It seems crystal clear.

Not so, according to Jonathan Barnett (USC) and Ted Sichelman (San Diego). A draft of their paper, Revisiting Labor Mobility in Innovation is now up on SSRN. In it, they take on the orthodoxy:

It is now widely asserted that legal regimes that enforce contractual and other limitations on labor mobility deter technological innovation. First, recent empirical studies purport to show relationships between bans on enforcing noncompete agreements, increased employee movement, and increased innovation. We find that these studies misconstrue legal differences across states and otherwise are flawed, incomplete, or limited in applicability. Second, scholars have largely adopted the view that California’s policy against noncompetes promoted Silicon Valley as the world’s leading technology center. By contrast, Massachusetts’ enforcement of noncompetes purportedly stunted innovation in the Route 128 region near Boston. We show that this account is incomplete. During the rise of Silicon Valley, California noncompete law did not as vigorously preclude noncompetes as today and firms could substantially mimic noncompetes through contractual and other instruments. Rather, fundamental technological and economic factors more persuasively account for the rise of Silicon Valley and the Boston area has remained a significant innovation center. There is little compelling ground for the view that barring noncompetes and other limitations on employee mobility promotes innovation.

I believe this is an important paper, even if you are not inclined to agree with its conclusions. I'll discuss more after the jump.

Perzanowski on Tattoo IP Norms

Here's a fun paper for a Sunday afternoon: in Intellectual Property Norms in the Tattoo Industry, Aaron Perzanowski (Wayne State, currently visiting at Notre Dame) argues that despite the availability of copyright protection, the tattoo industry relies on "a complex set of social norms enforced through informal mechanisms" to resolve disputes over copying.

David Fagundes on Roller Derby IP

Can you learn something about intellectual property by studying roller derby girls? Apparently yes: David Fagundes (Southwestern Law) has posted an entertaining new article, Talk Derby to Me: Emergent Intellectual Property Norms Governing Roller Derby Pseudonyms (forthcoming in the Texas Law Review). Fagundes expands on work by Robert Ellickson and others on the role of social norms in creating order without law. From the abstract:

This analysis of derby names shows that IP norms emerge independently of law’s substantive (un)availability, so long as the relevant group is close-knit and the norms are welfare-maximizing. These groups are especially likely to craft formal regulation and registration schemes to buttress informal norms where the relevant community is identity-constitutive, and where the intangible goods arise from nonmarket production. In addition to this critique of existing explanations for IP norm emergence, this study suggests a counter-theory for the emergence of user-generated IP governance systems, casts (further) doubt on the coherence of the prevailing neoclassical economic assumptions underlying IP law, and calls into question what it means for rules to be law.

If, like me, you hadn't heard of roller derby pseudonyms, check out the description of them on pp. 11-12, with names including Tara Armov, Paris Killton, Venus de Maul'r, Paris Troika, Madam Ovary, and Raven Seaward.