Confidentiality in Patent Dispute Resolution: Antitrust implications

nformation is crucial to the functioning of the patent system, as it is for other markets. Nevertheless, patent licensing terms are often subject to confidentiality agreements. On the one hand, this is not surprising: sellers and buyers do not normally publicize the details of their transactions. On the other hand, explicit confidentiality agreements are not common in other markets, and they may be particularly problematic for patents. Several United States Supreme Court cases have condemned agreements that suppress market information, and those cases could be applied to confidentiality agreements in the patent context. Of course, confidentiality may sometimes be pro-competitive, particularly when it involves only private negotiations. In other contexts, however, and notably in arbitration, which is a substitute for open court proceedings, the competitive balance is more problematic. Indeed, U.S. patent law mandates that patent arbitration awards be made public through the Patent and Trademark Office, though this requirement is generally ignored. Information about licensing terms is particularly important in one of today’s most important patent licensing contexts. The standard-setting organizations that define the technologies used in products like smartphones typically require their members to commit to license patented technologies that are adopted in standards on fair, reasonable, and non- discriminatory (FRAND) terms. The non-discriminatory element of this commitment is difficult for potential licensees to enforce without information about the licensing terms to which other licensees have agreed. This Article describes the value of patent licensing information and discusses the antitrust implications of agreements to keep that information confidential, particularly in the FRAND context and in arbitration. The Article also offers several ways in which parties, standard- setting organizations, and arbitration bodies could seek to avoid the anticompetitive effects of confidentiality

Recent advances in technologies for developing drugs against Chlamydia pneumoniae

Peer reviewe

Innocence, Harmless Error, and Federal Wrongful Conviction Law

This Article examines the body of law emerging in cases brought by former criminal defendants once exonerated, often through DNA testing, which may fundamentally reshape our criminal justice system. Federal wrongful conviction actions share a novel construction - they rely on criminal procedure rights incorporated as an element in a civil rights lawsuit. During a criminal trial, remedies for violations of procedural rights are often seen as truth defeating, because they exclude evidence possibly probative of guilt. In a civil wrongful conviction action, that remedial paradigm is reversed. The exonerated defendant instead seeks to remedy government misconduct that was truth defeating and concealed evidence of innocence. This Article contends that in a civil case, the harmless error rules that limit remedies for violations of criminal procedure rights do not apply. Further, though not generally recognized as such, the Supreme Court has created internal harmless error rules to accompany each of the relevant fair trial claims: the Brady v. Maryland right to have exculpatory evidence disclosed; the right to effective assistance of counsel; the right to be free from suggestive eyewitness identification procedures; and the right not to be subject to a coerced confession. Civil claims suggest the transformative result that for each right, harmless error insulation is stripped away. This Article concludes by reflecting on how wrongful conviction suits may spearhead wide-ranging reform of our criminal justice system and renew substantive development of the constitutional right to a fair trial

An information assistant system for the prevention of tunnel vision in crisis management

In the crisis management environment, tunnel vision is a set of bias in decision makers’ cognitive process which often leads to incorrect understanding of the real crisis situation, biased perception of information, and improper decisions. The tunnel vision phenomenon is a consequence of both the challenges in the task and the natural limitation in a human being’s cognitive process. An information assistant system is proposed with the purpose of preventing tunnel vision. The system serves as a platform for monitoring the on-going crisis event. All information goes through the system before arrives at the user. The system enhances the data quality, reduces the data quantity and presents the crisis information in a manner that prevents or repairs the user’s cognitive overload. While working with such a system, the users (crisis managers) are expected to be more likely to stay aware of the actual situation, stay open minded to possibilities, and make proper decisions

Privacy preserving data mining

A fruitful direction for future data mining research will be the development of technique that incorporates privacy concerns. Specifically, we address the following question. Since the primary task in data mining is the development of models about aggregated data, can we develop accurate models without access to precise information in individual data records? We analyze the possibility of privacy in data mining techniques in two phasesrandomization and reconstruction. Data mining services require accurate input data for their results to be meaningful, but privacy concerns may influence users to provide spurious information. To preserve client privacy in the data mining process, techniques based on random perturbation of data records are used. Suppose there are many clients, each having some personal information, and one server, which is interested only in aggregate, statistically significant, properties of this information. The clients can protect privacy of their data by perturbing it with a randomization algorithm and then submitting the randomized version. This approach is called randomization. The randomization algorithm is chosen so that aggregate properties of the data can be recovered with sufficient precision, while individual entries are significantly distorted. For the concept of using value distortion to protect privacy to be useful, we need to be able to reconstruct the original data distribution so that data mining techniques can be effectively utilized to yield the required statistics. Analysis Let xi be the original instance of data at client i. We introduce a random shift yi using randomization technique explained below. The server runs the reconstruction algorithm (also explained below) on the perturbed value zi = xi + yi to get an approximate of the original data distribution suitable for data mining applications. Randomization We have used the following randomizing operator for data perturbation: Given x, let R(x) be x+€ (mod 1001) where € is chosen uniformly at random in {-100…100}. Reconstruction of discrete data set P(X=x) = f X (x) ----Given P(Y=y) = F y (y) ---Given P (Z=z) = f Z (z) ---Given f (X/Z) = P(X=x | Z=z) = P(X=x, Z=z)/P (Z=z) = P(X=x, X+Y=Z)/ f Z (z) = P(X=x, Y=Z - X)/ f Z (z) = P(X=x)*P(Y=Z-X)/ f Z (z) = P(X=x)*P(Y=y)/ f Z (z) Results In this project we have done two aspects of privacy preserving data mining. The first phase involves perturbing the original data set using ‘randomization operator’ techniques and the second phase deals with reconstructing the randomized data set using the proposed algorithm to get an approximate of the original data set. The performance metrics like percentage deviation, accuracy and privacy breaches were calculated. In this project we studied the technical feasibility of realizing privacy preserving data mining. The basic promise was that the sensitive values in a user’s record will be perturbed using a randomizing function and an approximate of the perturbed data set be recovered using reconstruction algorithm

Trust and Betrayal in the Medical Marketplace

The author argues in this Comment that disingenuity as first resort is an unwise approach to the conflict between our ex ante and our later, illness-endangered selves. Not only does rationing by tacit deceit raise a host of moral problems, it will not work, over the long haul, because markets reward deceit\u27s unmasking. The honesty about clinical limit-setting that some bioethicists urge may not be fully within our reach. But more candor is possible than we now achieve, and the more conscious we are about decisions to impose limits, the more inclined we will be to accept them without experiencing betrayal