Misconstruing Whistleblower Immunity Under the Defend Trade Secrets Act

In crafting the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA), Congress went beyond the federalization of state trade secret protection to tackle a broader social justice problem: the misuse of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) to discourage reporting of illegal activity in a variety of areas. The past few decades have witnessed devastating government contracting abuses, regulatory violations, and deceptive financial schemes that have hurt the public and cost taxpayers and investors billions of dollars. Congress recognized that immunizing whistleblowers from the cost and risk of trade secret liability for providing information to the Government could spur law enforcement. But could this goal be accomplished without jeopardizing legitimate trade secret protection

A Method for Reforming the Patent System

The principal recent studies of patent reform (NAS (2004), FTC (2003), Jaffe and Lerner (2004)) contend that a uniform system of patent protection must (or should) be available for anything under the sun made by man based upon one or more of the following premises: (1) the Patent Act requires this breadth and uniformity of treatment; (2) discriminating against any particular field of technology would be undesirable; (3) discrimination among technologies would present insurmountable boundary problems and could easily be circumvented through clever patent drafting; and (4) interest group politics stand in the way of excluding any subject matter classes from patent law or reforming the patentability requirements, duration, defenses, or remedies for a particular subject matter class. As a result, these studies consider and recommend reforms that would apply to all fields of patentable subject matter ( systemic reforms ) and largely ignore reforms that would either bar particular classes of technology from patent protection (e.g., software, business method, genomic sequences) or afford different classes of patentable subject matter different requirements or remedies ( categorical reforms ). This Article sets forth a method for evaluating and formulating patent policy that considers both systemic and categorical reforms and sketches out how that method could be applied to the current patent crisis

Reflections on Music Copyright Justice

The digital revolution has upended many aspects of the copyright system, particularly as it relates to music. Drawing on creative, jurisprudential, technological, and social science insights, this article explores the broad range of music copyright justice concerns, ranging from file sharing to royalty distribution, copyright infringement standards, and the creation of music mashups

A Method for Reforming the Patent System

The principal recent studies of patent reform (NAS (2004), FTC (2003), Jaffe and Lerner (2004)) contend that a uniform system of patent protection must (or should) be available for anything under the sun made by man based upon one or more of the following premises: (1) the Patent Act requires this breadth and uniformity of treatment; (2) discriminating against any particular field of technology would be undesirable; (3) discrimination among technologies would present insurmountable boundary problems and could easily be circumvented through clever patent drafting; and (4) interest group politics stand in the way of excluding any subject matter classes from patent law or reforming the patentability requirements, duration, defenses, or remedies for a particular subject matter class. As a result, these studies consider and recommend reforms that would apply to all fields of patentable subject matter ( systemic reforms ) and largely ignore reforms that would either bar particular classes of technology from patent protection (e.g., software, business method, genomic sequences) or afford different classes of patentable subject matter different requirements or remedies ( categorical reforms ). This Article sets forth a method for evaluating and formulating patent policy that considers both systemic and categorical reforms and sketches out how that method could be applied to the current patent crisis