Regulation of Book Markets

Over the years, many European countries have regulated their national book markets. Chief among the regulatory schemes is the resale price maintenance (“RPM”) regime, under which booksellers must offer books for a fixed price for a limited time period. The suggested rationales for this legal regime are mainly: (1) viewing books as cultural goods that deserve special treatment; (2) advancing diversity in the book market; (3) creating a wide distribution of and accessibility to books; and (4) supporting small booksellers. This Article explores the normative rationales for the RPM regime’s adoption and design in book markets. The RPM regime has been discussed and analyzed using a positive economic framework, but its application in reality has been missing a normative theoretical basis. This Article demonstrates that absent such a theoretical basis, policymaking is meaningless. Policymakers as well as courts cannot solely rely on positive economic analysis. Normative analysis is inevitable. This Article explores the missing normative analysis of RPM regimes in the context of book markets. It exposes an important blind spot in regulatory policy and judicial judgment. Lastly, the normative framework introduced in this Article may prove relevant for American RPM arrangements. Since American antitrust scrutiny of RPM schemes recently transformed from a per se rule to a rule of reason analysis, American policymakers and courts are expected to encounter a new wave of resurfacing RPM schemes

Fair Use as a Market Facilitator

The Digital Age has enabled individuals worldwide to store, organize, and share everything from cherished memories embodied in photographs and videos to academic writing and correspondence. Yet, archived collections of academic, public, and private libraries are out of reach to many, and many books are now beyond reach because they are no longer in print. The high cost of digitization exacerbates these challenges. In 2004, Google Inc. responded to these issues by announcing a project to scan and digitize the collections of several leading universities and public libraries (the “Google Books” project). The project offered users the opportunity to search the entire corpus of scanned works. For works still under copyright, users could view only snippets sufficient to give them a taste of the complete work; users interested in accessing the full text could, however, buy the books from the publisher directly through links that the system provides. Several authors and publishers filed suit in the Southern District of New York, arguing that the Google Books project infringed their copyrights in their works. The district court held that allowing users to search unauthorized digital copies of the works and see snippets from those works was noninfringing fair use. The Second Circuit affirmed. The courts reasoned that the purpose of the copying was highly transformative, the public display of text was limited, and the project did not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the original works. This article explores the effects of these decisions, arguing that the fair use holding played a major role in facilitating the creation of markets for archiving copyrighted works. This market facilitation role is atypical of the fair use defense’s usual role and arguably fails fully to account for the effect that the use could have upon the potential market for—or value of—the copyrighted work. This article will explore the fair use defense’s unexpected market facilitation role and suggest that it should be carefully considered by courts, especially in light of the rationales underlying the fair use defense, which focus mainly on market failure and freedom of speech

Unregistered Patents

Although all should be treated equally under the law, patent law has long been known to favor some less than others. Patentable technology is highly heterogeneous, covering everything from minute improvements in electronics to pioneering new artificial organs, but patent protection itself is purely a one-size-fits-all system. Patents thus overreward some while underrewarding others. On the one hand, patents overreward low-investment, low-value inventions by granting them the same twenty-year term of protection as those that required much higher investments and yield much higher social value. The resulting glut of low-quality patents has contributed greatly to the “patent crisis” of opportunistic “patent trolls,” heightened transaction costs, and costly litigation that have ultimately stalled innovation. On the other hand, patents also underreward in two significant ways. First, patents often fail to give some high-investment, high-value inventions enough protection. Second, many inventors are shut out from patent protection altogether if they lack the resources necessary to navigate the patent system’s costly, complex, and frequently biased examination process. This latter phenomenon disproportionately affects female and minority inventors, among others, thereby creating significant distributive effects. This Article argues that both of these effects—the overprotection of low-value inventions and the underprotection of inventions by women and minorities—could be alleviated by altering one particular but seldom-appreciated aspect of the patent system’s one-size-fits-all approach: its registration-only design. Copyright and trademark law allow for both registered and unregistered rights, but the patent system grants rights only to those who register their inventions and undergo subsequent examination. If the patent system were to follow the two-tiered approach of copyright and trademark law, however, and implement a regime of automatic but very limited unregistered rights in addition to registered rights, it could help address both problems. First, providing a much lower-cost alternative for obtaining protection, such a two-tiered regime could, with varying degrees of aggressiveness, channel low-investment, low-value inventions away from the system-clogging overprotections of the full, twenty-year, broad rights currently granted to registered patents. Second, as the authors of this Article have previously argued, by providing automatic rights without having to go through the resource-intensive registration and examination process, unregistered patent protection could help women and other disadvantaged inventors gain greater access to patent protections. Maintaining a two-tiered regime of both registered and unregistered patent rights thus offers a promising way to mitigate the inefficiencies of the current system by attenuating certain aspects of the current patent crisis while promoting a more egalitarian playing field for inventors

The Gender Gap in Academic Patenting

The gender gap in academia has long been the focus of public discourse regarding the role of universities in promoting social values. In this study, we consider women’s participation in transferring knowledge from the academy to industry. A prominent model for such transfer is reflected in patent registration for inventions developed through scholarly research. And while academic patenting is a significant component of the professional activities of many faculty members, the extent to which women’s scientific discoveries are patented and commercialized has received relatively little attention. The U.S. academy is a leader in science and a pioneer of technology transfer. This study analyzes the extent to which inventions by academic women are protected by university patents. Through analysis of inventors’ names, we ascertain the expected gender of inventors listed on applications filed by U.S. academic institutions. From this data, we report the extent to which a gender gap exists in patent application, grant rates, fields of research, and forward citations. Our study yielded several key findings. First, we found a significant increase in the number of patent applications originating from universities from 2000 to 2015. We identified a similar increase in applications by inventor teams made up of only women, though these applications were granted at a lower rate and were cited less frequently than patents obtained by teams including men. We found differences in team composition, with women being much more likely to work alone than men. We also noted an interesting disparity in subject matter, with drugs and chemistry (especially molecular biology) dominating the technological fields of university applications. The Article concludes that while women increasingly participate in academic patenting, a significant gender gap persists. Our findings may serve as a springboard for further research on the reasons for the failure to achieve gender equality, as women’s representation in the academy continues to increase

An Empirical Study of Gender and Race in Trademark Prosecution

This Article is the first to empirically examine the extent to which women and minorities succeed in prosecuting trademark applications before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”). Trademark registration is an important measure of entrepreneurial activity and progress in business, education, and the arts. To explore how women and minorities are succeeding in this domain, we compared 1.2 million trademark applications over thirty years with demographic information on race and gender. We analyze whether trademark prosecution reflects systematic underrepresentation of women and minorities similar to those reported in patent and copyright prosecution. We found that trademark data showed significant differences from the other two federal intellectual property (“IP”) regimes. Our analysis reveals that women regularly secure trademark registration at a higher rate than men. Women are underrepresented in the pool of trademark applicants compared to their presence in the population, but not all minority groups are underrepresented. For women and underrepresented minorities, the disparity is decreasing at a rate not seen in other IP registration systems. While recent work has significantly advanced our understanding of trademark prosecution, no published studies consider the race and gender of trademark applicants. By filling that void, this Article substantially contributes to our understanding of minority intellectual property ownership and provides a new foundation for policy shifts and further research to assure that intellectual property ownership paths, theory, law, and reform are grounded in equality

Recalibrating Patent Protection for COVID-19 Vaccines: A Path to Affordable Access and Equitable Distribution

A safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine is the holy grail of our generation, necessary to resurrect our societies, save millions of lives, and protect our economies from collapse. Patent protection is the primary legal mechanism for ensuring timely development of such a vaccine. The patent system is designed to create the necessary incentives for private parties to invest in developing the vaccine, knowing they will enjoy the fruits of their success. Indeed, patent protection is necessary to promote human knowledge generally as well as a quick, safe, and effective COVID-19 vaccine. Yet in reality, patent law may be obstructing the very goal it is intended to achieve. Patent law grants exclusive rights to inventors, enabling them to charge supracompetitive prices, delaying the distribution and dissemination of emerging technologies. In the context of the COVID-19 vaccine, patent protection means that vaccines will be financially out of reach for many. This produces a paradoxical result: rather than promote technological advancement for the public good, patent protection impedes it. Since universal immunity is necessary in the fight against the pandemic, delays in vaccine distribution can be catastrophic, costing millions of lives and carrying devastating economic consequences. This Article therefore proposes a novel, alternative patent regime, designed to overcome this paradox at the heart of patent law. We propose a mechanism that will eliminate the problem of overprotection of patent rights that exists under current patent law, while still providing sufficient incentive for inventors to invest in innovative efforts. Under our proposed regime, the developer of a new vaccine will be granted a patent protecting its invention, but this patent will expire once the patentee has recouped its investment, plus a handsome profit. This regime, which we term “recoupment patent,” ensures that inventors are rewarded appropriately—but not excessively—for their innovative efforts. The result is a structure that encourages innovation while minimizing the time it takes for life-saving inventions to reach the public domain. We compare the proposed regime with other suggestions for reforming the patent system, including compulsory licensing; government incentives such as grants, subsidies, and prizes; and altruistic initiatives such as private-public partnerships, patent pools, and patent pledges. We highlight the recoupment patent model’s advantages over these alternatives