On January 18, 2012, the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s power under the Patent and Copyright Clause to grant copyrights to foreign authors for their works that had been in the public domain in the United States, often for decades. Congress had granted these copyrights as part of the enabling legislation pursuant to the 1994 round of the GATT agreements, according to which the U.S. was arguably required to grant copyrights to foreign authors if the authors’ works were still in copyright in their home countries.

Our IP experts will discuss the case and whether the Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution should allow granting copyrights to existing, public domain works, and more generally, what limitations the IP Clause and the First Amendment place on Congress when it passes IP laws. They will also discuss how the challenged law in Golanaffects incentives to create and distribute inventive and artistic works, and what type of future IP laws Congress might pass given the license granted it by the Court in this case. Featuring Prof. Adam Mossoff of George Mason University School of Law; Prof. Christopher Newman of George Mason University School of Law; Prof. David Olson of Boston College Law School; and Mr. Dean A. Reuter, Vice President & Director of Practice Groups at The Federalist Society, as the moderator.

United States patent law has traditionally authorized the grant of patent rights to the first to invent or to discover a patentable invention, subject to specified terms and conditions. But the America Invents Act replaced the "first-to-invent" system with the "first to file" system long enforced in England and in other countries by deleting or rewriting numerous references to priority of inventorship in the existing statutory sections concerning novelty and obviousness. Does this change rewrite core patent law fundamentals in this country and shift the balance among individual inventors, large corporations, and patent holding companies? What is the likely effect on innovation and development, the keys to a growing economy? Are the projected benefits worth the anticipated costs? Under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, is the change Constitutional? Featuring Prof. Richard A. Epstein of New York University School of Law; Prof. F. Scott Kieff of The George Washington University Law School; Prof. David S. Olson of Boston College Law School; and Mr. Dean A. Reuter, Vice President & Director of Practice Groups for The Federalist Society, as the moderator.

Copyright law, like contract law, is deceptively complex. Just as the familiar elements of offer, acceptance, and consideration can give rise to endless disputes not easily resolved, the seemingly simple notion that an author has a time-limited monopoly on rights to a particular work of authorship gives rise to many questions. Given constantly-changing technology for fixing works of original expression in tangible media, ever-evolving means of copying and piracy, and repeated revisions to U.S. copyright law, both the courts and creators have had a difficult time understanding core concepts and keeping up with how the law is applied. Nowhere is this difficulty more apparent than in the Second Circuit’s attempts to keep the law of copyright straight in the area of “hot news.” [Read more!]

The Intellectual Property Practice Group hosted this panel on "IP and Parallel Importation—Should the U.S., Through IP Laws and Other Means, Protect Businesses from “Gray Goods” Imported Without Manufacturers’ Authorization?" on Thursday, November 10, 2011, during the 2011 National Lawyers Convention. This panel featured Prof. F. Scott Kieff of The George Washington University Law School and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; Prof. David S. Olson of Boston College Law School; Mr. David Salmons of Bingham McCutchen LLP; Mr. Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge; and Judge Randall R. Rader of the U. S. Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit as the moderator.