Evaluation of installed performance of a wing-tip-mounted pusher turboprop on a semispan wing

An exploratory investigation has been conducted at the Langley Research Center to determine the effect of a wing-tip-mounted pusher turboprop on the aerodynamic characteristics of a semispan wing. Tests were conducted on a semispan model with an upswept, untapered wing and an airdriven motor that powered an SR-2 high-speed propeller located on the tip of the wing as a pusher propeller. All tests were conducted at a Mach number of 0.70 over an angle-of-attack range from approximately -2 to 4 deg at a Reynolds number of 3.82 x 10 to the 6th based on the wing reference chord of 13 in. The data indicate that, as a result of locating the propeller behind the wing trailing edge at the wing tip in the crossflow of the wing-tip vortex, it is possible to improve propeller performance and simultaneously reduce the lift-induced drag

Patent Law, the Federal Circuit, and the Supreme Court, A Quiet Revolution

Over the last twenty years, a quiet revolution has taken place in patent law. Traditionally, patents were rarely valid, but if valid, broadly enforced. Since Congress created the Federal Circuit in 1982 and vested it with exclusive intermediate appellate jurisdiction over patent appeals, patents have become routinely valid, but narrowly enforced. This article evaluates the economic consequences of this revolution. Focusing on the reasons for, and the costs of, uniformity in patent protection, this article shows that the revolution will tend to limit the patent system\u27s ability to ensure the expected profitability, and hence the existence, of desirable, but high cost innovation

The Trade Dress Emperor\u27s New Clothes: Why Trade Dress Does Not Belong on the Principal Register

We take it largely for granted today that the Trademark Act of 1946 permits the registration of trade dress on the principal register, but it has not always been the rule. Until 1958, the Patent and Trademark Office, following Congress\u27s intent expressed in the Act\u27s plain language and legislative history, excluded trade dress from the principal register as a matter of law. In 1958, Assistant Commissioner Daphne Robert Leeds changed the rule and allowed the registration of a product package as a trademark on the principal register. Unable to find any legitimate basis for reading the Trademark Act to permit trade dress on the principal register, Leeds simply asserted her desired result as conclusion, willfully replacing Congress\u27s decision on the issue with her own. In this Article, Professor Lunney argues that time has largely erased our memories of trade dress\u27s dubious claim to the principal register. And courts, over the last twenty years, have crafted an extensive regime of federal trade dress protection out of Leeds\u27s erroneous interpretation. Yet, even today, a fair-minded review of the Trademark Act of 1946 and its legislative history reveals that there is no lawful basis for allowing trade dress on the principal register. As with the Emperor and his new clothes, the only real question is whether, following its revelation, courts and the Patent and Trademark Office are willing to recognize this naked truth

Patent Law, the Federal Circuit, and the Supreme Court, A Quiet Revolution

Over the last twenty years, a quiet revolution has taken place in patent law. Traditionally, patents were rarely valid, but if valid, broadly enforced. Since Congress created the Federal Circuit in 1982 and vested it with exclusive intermediate appellate jurisdiction over patent appeals, patents have become routinely valid, but narrowly enforced. This article evaluates the economic consequences of this revolution. Focusing on the reasons for, and the costs of, uniformity in patent protection, this article shows that the revolution will tend to limit the patent system\u27s ability to ensure the expected profitability, and hence the existence, of desirable, but high cost innovation

Copyright, Derivative Works, and the Economics of Complements

From an economic perspective, copyright is irrational. In defining the scope of a copyright owner\u27s exclusive rights, it treats situations that have similar economic consequences differently, as infringement in one case and not in the other, and situations that have radically different economic consequences similarly. This essay explores such area in which copyright exhibits economic irrationality: Copyright\u27s treatment of complements. Where a lower price on a substitute reduces demand for the original, a lower price on a complement increases it. So defined, copyright addresses whether a copyright owner will control three different types of complements: (i) complementary products, such as MP3 players and VCRs, that increase the accessibility of copyright works; (ii) complementary uses of copyrighted works, such as radio airplay; and (iii) complementary reworkings of copyrighted works, such as movies based upon a novel. Although the economic consequences associated with these complements are identical, copyright treats these complements differently. Some are infringing, at least, some of the time; others are not. This essay explores this irrationality and proposes a unifying principle: Where a given use, reuse, or product is a strong complement to a copyrighted work, and would, in the absence of copyright\u27s intervention, be available in a naturally competitive market, the copyright owner should not have the exclusive right to control such a use, reuse, or product

Copyright\u27s Price Discrimination Panacea

According to the conventional wisdom, price discrimination offers two advantages compared to uniform or linear pricing in the production of copyrighted works. First, it can reduce the deadweight losses otherwise associated with the higher prices that copyright makes possible. Second, it can increase the producer surplus or rents associated with the production of any given copyrighted work and thus ensure the expected profitability of a wider range of works. This increase in profitability should, in turn, lead to the production of more copyrighted works. If the conventional wisdom is right, then the proper response would be not merely to tolerate, but to actively promote price discrimination schemes with respect to works of authorship. Accordingly, if changes to copyright\u27s existing legal rules would enable more, or more perfect, price discrimination, then such changes should be adopted. Of course, not everyone is so sanguine about price discrimination. Existing economic and legal critiques have focused on the first supposed advantage, and have shown that a shift to price discrimination will not always reduce, and may sometimes increase, deadweight losses. Yet, these critiques have not reduced the pervasive, almost absurdly utopian perception of price discrimination--perhaps because they do not address price discrimination\u27s second supposed advantage. As a result, these critiques leave open the argument that even if a price discrimination scheme only converts consumer surplus into producer surplus, it still enhances social welfare by increasing the incentives to produce more and better works of authorship. This Article reexamines the second supposed advantage and offers an alternative critique of price discrimination as a panacea for the monopoly costs copyright can impose. Both the traditional theoretical account of the desirability of price discrimination and the existing critiques rely on a partial equilibrium analysis. They examine the consequences of various price discrimination schemes only for the specific market at issue--the market for a specific copyrighted work or for copyrighted works more generally--and ignore or assume away any effects on the remainder of the economy. This use of partial equilibrium analysis is troubling. If an increased ability to price discriminate, whether driven by technological changes or changes in copyright law, leads to the production of more works of authorship, the resources to produce those additional works must come from somewhere. Over the long run, we cannot assume that the necessary resources would otherwise have been left idle. Rather, to produce more works of authorship, the resources must be taken from some other productive sectors of the economy. This is not to say that the resource necessary to produce more works of authorship, namely creativity, is ultimately limited--a nonrenewable resource, as it were--but simply an acknowledgement that creativity, like any other resource, is scarce. At any point, the time and talent used to write a book, direct a movie, or compose a song cannot simultaneously be used for something else. This raises the question of whether encouraging people to devote additional time and talent to producing more works of authorship generates more value for society than the something else to which those resources would otherwise have been devoted. Partial equilibrium analysis answers this question by assuming that the remainder of the economy consists of markets that are both complete and perfectly competitive. So long as the remainder of the economy satisfies these assumptions, every other market will, at equilibrium, reach a point where both the marginal social value and cost, and the marginal private value and cost, are equal and fully reflected in the price of the resources. Given these assumptions, if implementing a price discrimination scheme enables the producers of copyrighted works to offer a higher price for the resources necessary to produce additional works, then this ability to pay more establishes that producing more works is the most valuable use of those resources. Moving away from the assumptions inherent in a partial equilibrium analysis leads to the world of the second-best. No longer are he effects on other markets assumed away by reciting the magic Latin incantation ceteris paribus--all else constant. Instead, one must expressly account for how changes in one imperfect market affect other imperfect markets. This Article presents a second-best model to examine the allocation of creativity in an economy. Instead of assuming perfect competition in all other markets, this model assumes that market power persists in all markets for creative goods. Using this assumption, it then examines the welfare consequences associated with a switch to perfect price discrimination in the market for one particular type of creative good. This model can be described as consisting of one market for copyrighted works and a second market for all other creative, non-copyrighted products. The model could also be described as having one market for a particular type of copyrighted work, such as films or books, or for a particular class of copyrighted works, such as digitally-distributed works, and a second market for all other copyrighted works. For either description, the key assumption is that to produce more of a given creative product, the necessary resources will come from another creative sector that is also imperfectly competitive or monopolistic, rather than from a non-creative sector that satisfies the assumptions of the perfect competition model. This Article takes up these issues in turn. Part II briefly introduces perfect or first-degree price discrimination and its efficiency advantages in a partial equilibrium analysis. Part III considers a second-best equilibrium model and uses it to examine the supposed efficiency advantages of first-degree price discrimination. Given the second-best equilibrium conclusions, Part IV addresses the various price discrimination schemes routinely employed in the marketing of copyrighted works and evaluates their likely welfare consequences in the real world. Part V concludes

Aereo and Copyright\u27s Private-Public Performance Line

On January 10, 2014, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in American Broadcasting Cos. v. Aereo, Inc. By doing so, the Court has seized an opportunity to bring some rationality to copyright\u27s line between public and private performances. In this pending case, the respondent, Aereo, uses thousands of tiny antennae to capture television broadcast signals, which then transmit the signals to its subscribers over the Internet. The question presented is whether Aereo publicly performs the copyrighted works carried in the television broadcast signals that are captured and retransmitted

Fair Use and Market Failure: Sony Revisited

With the development and dissemination of digital technology, the importance of private copying and its legal status, whether fair or unfair under copyright law, has only increased. Yet, despite its status as the Court\u27s first and only pronouncement on the issue, Sony has played surprisingly little role in this ongoing debate. Even in cases bearing seemingly close similarity to the home-taping at issue in Sony itself, such as the private, home copying of musical works, courts have refused to follow Sony\u27s fair use outcome. Having been narrowly construed as an exceptional instance of market failure, Sony seldom appears to have direct application to fair use cases generally, and courts have repeatedly rejected application of the Sony analysis outside of its specific factual context. Ironically, until clarified by the Court in Campbell, courts relied on certain dicta in Sony limiting the availability of the fair use doctrine for commercial uses far more than they relied on Sony\u27s actual fair use holding. In this Article, I would like to revisit Sony with the aim of achieving, if not a radical rewriting, at least a rational revitalization of Sony and copyright\u27s fair use doctrine more generally. Properly understood, Sony stands not for the proposition that fair use is justified only in those exceptional cases where a licensing scheme or some other market mechanism is impractical. Rather, Sony stands for the recognition of fair use as a central and vital arbiter between two competing public interests. On the one side, a use that is considered fair and is allowed to continue may indirectly lead to fewer works of authorship by reducing the incentives to create such works. On the other, allowing such use to continue may directly improve the public\u27s ability to use, transform, or otherwise obtain access to existing works