Open Video at NYLS and Smart Phones at Whittier

Two more conference announcements: on Sept. 10-12, New York Law School is hosting the Open Video Conference, and on Nov. 4, Whittier Law School is hosting a symposium on the Law of the Smart Phone. Whittier's symposium is related to a student writing competition with a $1000 prize; the deadline is Sept. 9.

Sean Seymore on "Null Patents"

In The Null Patent, Sean Seymore (Vanderbilt Law and Chemistry) makes the creative proposal that the patent system could help solve the problem of unpublished negative scientific results. Negative results are very important: they can save other scientists from wasting time on dead-ends, and they can help identify false positives in studies based on statistical significance. (There is generally a 5% chance that a "significant" result is just based on random error, which is a problem if only significant results are published, as xkcd aptly illustrates.) So it would certainly be good for science if more negative results were published. But what do patents have to do with this?

More Upcoming IP Conferences

Some IP conferences and seminars in the 2011-12 academic year, as reported by Madisonian:

Jacob Rooksby on University Patent Litigation

Although one might expect universities to seldom initiate patent litigation, Jacob Rooksby reports that they filed over 50 patent cases in 2009 and 2010. In University Initiation of Patent Infringement Litigation, after reviewing the history and criticisms of the Bayh-Dole Act (which allows recipients of federal research funds to patent and license their inventions), Rooksby notes that "[o]ne largely overlooked cost of university involvement in technology transfer is university involvement in patent-related litigation." His article, which was recently published in the John Marshall Review of Intellectual Property Law, seeks to fill that empirical void. Rooksby was an IP litigator for 3 years, and is now pursing a Ph.D. in higher education at UVA.

Top 10 New IP Paper Downloads

What are the most downloaded IP papers that were posted on SSRN in the past 60 days? Aside from Bessen's article, the list is entirely new since I posted it in July:

Anna Laakmann: Pragmatic Patent Adjudication

Could the Federal Circuit fix the empirical stalemate in patent law by moving toward a more candid, pragmatic, and information-eliciting approach, focused on patentable subject matter doctrine? This is the thesis of a working paper by Professor Anna Laakmann (VAP at Penn State), Pragmatic Patent Adjudication, which she presented in the same session as me at IPSC.

Antitrust IP Conference at Stanford - Oct. 6

"Should Google be considered a dangerous monopoly, or is competition just 'a click away'? . . . How will antitrust and IP rules apply to Open Source? What lies ahead for Antitrust and IP in China? What is the future direction of the global market for patents? And what are the latest antitrust challenges facing mergers in the technology and communications industry?"

These questions will be addressed at the ABA Conference at Stanford on Oct. 6: Antitrust and IP in Silicon Valley and Beyond. Hear speakers from the FTC, DOJ, IV, Square, Microsoft, and more. Conference participants will also receive iPads and voting clickers for interactive participation! (Presumably you have to give the iPads back.) The conference is free for law students and has a reduced rate for academics. For more, see announcements from the ABA and from Stanford.

IPSC Today and Tomorrow

I'm in Chicago for the annual IP Scholars Conference (IPSC) today and tomorrow. This year the conference is at DePaul, and the schedule is available here. DePaul law student Daniel Rogna is live-blogging the conference; updates are available on the IPSC Blog and the CIPLIT twitter account. I'm sure I'll be writing more about many of the posted conference papers in the coming month!

What Experience Is Necessary To Write Good Patent Scholarship?

Between taking the patent-law-less bar exam and moving, I haven't had much time for reading scholarship in the past few weeks, so I am looking forward to two full days of IP scholarship at IPSC this week. But Friday's guest post at Patently-O reminded me of a trend I've noticed at the intersection of the academic and practicing patent law communities: practitioners criticizing academics simply for being "academic." Are these merely ad hominem attacks, or is practice experience and/or a technical background really necessary to write good patent scholarship?

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.

Adam Mossoff on Patent History and Commercialization

Historical sources can help in "rediscovering the fundamental commercialization policy within patent law," argues Professor Adam Mossoff (George Mason Law) in his recently posted book chapter, Commercializing Property Rights in Inventions: Lessons for Modern Patent Theory from Classic Patent Doctrine. (If you want to buy the whole book, it looks like it is cheapest from Walmart.) Here is the abstract: