What Patent Attorney Fee Awards Really Look Like

This Essay provides an empirical account of attorney fee awards over the last decade of patent litigation. Given the current attention in legislative proposals and on the Supreme Court’s docket to more liberal fee shifting as a check on abusive patent litigation, a fuller descriptive understanding of the current regime is of utmost importance to forming sound patent-litigation policy. Following a brief overview of judicial experience in patent cases and trends in patent-case filing, this study presents analysis of over 200 attorney fee award orders from 2003–2013

What\u27s It Worth to Keep a Secret?

This article is the first major study of protection and valuation of trade secrets under federal criminal law. Trade secrecy is more important than ever as an economic complement and substitute for other intellectual property protections, particularly patents. Accordingly, U.S. public policy correctly places a growing emphasis on characterizing the scope of trade secrets, creating incentives for their productive use, and imposing penalties for their theft. Yet amid this complex ecosystem of legal doctrine, economic policy, commercial strategy, and enforcement, there is little research or consensus on how to assign value to trade secrets. One reason for this gap is that intangible assets in general are notoriously difficult to value, and trade secrecy by its opaque nature is ill-suited to the market-signaling mechanisms that offer at least some traction in other forms of valuation. Another reason is that criminal trade secret law is relatively young, and the usual corrective approaches to valuation in civil trade secrecy are not synonymous with the greater distributive concerns of criminal law. To begin to fill this gap, we examine over a decade of trade secret protection and valuation under the U.S. Economic Espionage Act of 1996. From original data on EEA prosecutions, we show that trade secret valuations are lognormally distributed as predicted by Gibrat’s Law, with valuations typically low on the order of $5 million but reaching as high as$250 million. There is no notable difference among estimates from various valuation methods, but a difference between high and low estimates on one hand and the sentencing estimates on the other. These findings suggest that the EEA has not been used to its full capacity, a conclusion buttressed by recent Congressional actions to strengthen the EEA

What's it worth to keep a secret?

This article is the first major study of protection and valuation of trade secrets under federal criminal law. Trade secrecy is more important than ever as an economic complement and substitute for other intellectual property protections, particularly patents. Accordingly, U.S. public policy correctly places a growing emphasis on characterizing the scope of trade secrets, creating incentives for their productive use, and imposing penalties for their theft. Yet amid this complex ecosystem of legal doctrine, economic policy, commercial strategy, and enforcement, there is little research or consensus on how to assign value to trade secrets. One reason for this gap is that intangible assets in general are notoriously difficult to value, and trade secrecy by its opaque nature is ill-suited to the market-signaling mechanisms that offer at least some traction in other forms of valuation. Another reason is that criminal trade secret law is relatively young, and the usual corrective approaches to valuation in civil trade secrecy are not synonymous with the greater distributive concerns of criminal law. To begin to fill this gap, we examine over a decade of trade secret protection and valuation under the U.S. Economic Espionage Act of 1996. From original data on EEA prosecutions, we show that trade secret valuations are lognormally distributed as predicted by Gibrat’s Law, with valuations typically low on the order of $5 million but reaching as high as$250 million. There is no notable difference among estimates from various valuation methods, but a difference between high and low estimates on one hand and the sentencing estimates on the other. These findings suggest that the EEA has not been used to its full capacity, a conclusion buttressed by recent Congressional actions to strengthen the EEA

The Non-Doctrine of Redundancy

This Article explores and evaluates a controversial practice that the Patent Office undertook beginning early in the post-AIA regime, the practice of denying otherwise meritorious requests for review because of what the Office termed redundant grounds. The controversy over redundancy-based rejections had several sources. One was that making such rejections required the Patent Office to decide petitions piecemeal—and, indeed, the agency claimed that power for itself—even though it was not clear that this power lay within the statute. Another source was that the Patent Office persistently declined to explain what, in the agency\u27s view, did or did not constitute redundancy. Still another was that the Patent Office resisted Federal Circuit oversight of this practice by claiming unreviewable discretion as part of a larger campaign of self-immunization. This confluence of problematic agency choices has generated other, related controversies with AIA review as well, with a mixed record of success for the Patent Office. Yet while redundancy-based rejection now seems to be ebbing as a matter of agency policy, the underlying structural conditions that gave rise to the practice still persist and repay closer analytical and doctrinal scrutiny. This Article offers that scrutiny and discusses ways forward for AIA review

Motion for Leave to File Brief of Law Professors Sarah Fackrell, Eric Goldman, Elizabeth Rosenblatt, and Saurabh Vishnubhakat as Amici Curiae in Support of Defendant-Appellee and Affirmance

Amici professors Sarah Fackrell (who previously published under the name Sarah Burstein), Eric Goldman, Elizabeth Rosenblatt, and Saurabh Vishnubhakat, respectfully move for leave to file a brief in support of Appellee in this appeal, pursuant to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 29(a)(2) and (a)(3). The brief is being tendered herewith. All parties have received notice of the filing of this brief. Counsel for Appellee AccEncyc US consents to the filing; counsel for Appellants Jacki Easlick LLC, JE Corporate LLC, indicated, after multiple requests over a seven-day period, that they are unable to state a position on the filing of the brief

The Growing Public Domain in Medicine

This essay describes the growing public domain of inventions associated with drugs and medicine, and geographies associated with identifiable shifts in the balance of innovation that may be especially favorable for promoting wider access to socially useful technologies. To do so, it departs from the largely ex ante perspective that currently informs the intersectional debate regarding human rights and patent rights and, instead, looks backward to inquire what innovations from past patents have already become publicly available in service of the human rights objective of greater access to technology. Ex post analysis of this kind may help public and private institutions alike in identifying cycles of innovation that sustainably deprioritize socially valuable technologies and leave them free for public use

Renewed Efficiency in Administrative Patent Revocation

Administrative patent revocation in the U.S. is poised to enter a new period of efficiency, though ironically it will be an efficiency that the America Invents Act originally put in place. The Court’s recent approval of the constitutionality of Patent Trial and Appeal Board ( PTAB ) proceedings was blunted by the Court’s accompanying rejection of partial institution. This Patent Office practice of accepting and denying validity review petitions piecemeal had been a key part of the agency’s procedural structure from the start. As a result, the Court’s decision in SAS Institute v. Iancu to require a binary choice — either fully accepting a PTAB petition or fully denying it — is already being criticized for sacrificing efficiency on the altar of wooden statutory interpretation, including two dissents from the decision itself. Starting from the premise that SAS Institute was rightly decided, however, this paper makes two contributions. The theoretical contribution is to contrast PTAB estoppel with ordinary principles of res judicata and collateral estoppel. This important context is lacking in the literature, and the profound effect of SAS Institute on PTAB estoppel makes this evaluation especially timely. The empirical contribution is to marshal new data and guide the difficult structural choices that the agency must now make in order to comply with SAS Institute.Notably, though Justice Ginsburg’s dissent suggested that the agency could comply with the Court’s decision through a few empty gestures, her mock proposal is actually a sound plan of action. By reinvigorating Congress’s view of efficiency, one that is more systemic than merely minimizing short-term agency workload, the Court has enabled the Patent Office to resolve open questions about the maturing system for resolving patent validity through administrative, rather than judicial, process

The Porous Court-Agency Border in Patent Law

The progression toward reevaluating patent validity in the administrative, rather than judicial, setting became overtly substitutionary in the America Invents Act. No longer content to encourage court litigants to rely on Patent Office expertise for faster, cheaper, and more accurate validity decisions, Congress in the AIA took steps to force a choice. The result is an emergent border between court and agency power in the U.S. patent system. By design, the border is not absolute. Concurrent activity in both settings over the same dispute remains possible. What is troubling is the systematic weakening of this border by Patent Office encroachments on powers Congress left to the courts. This Article traces the statutory roots of those encroachments, their initial encouragement by the Supreme Court’s 2016 Cuozzo decision, and the recent resistance to their further expansion by the en banc Federal Circuit’s 2018 Wi-Fi One decision. Section I introduces the institutional history that underpins these developments. Section II summarizes the reallocation of ex post validity review power from the district courts to the Patent Office over the last third of a century, putting important attributes of Patent Office review into an administrative law context. Section III describes the particular powers being reallocated and discusses the importance of these powers to a well-functioning system for governing innovation as patent law seeks to do. Section IV reviews the recent en banc Federal Circuit decision in Wi-Fi One v. Broadcom and discusses its implications for the patent powers at stake