Rethinking patent law / Robin Feldman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Feldman, Robin.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Patent laws and legislation--United States.

Patent laws and legislation.

United States.

Physical Description:

279 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2012.

Summary:

Feldman (law, U. of California Hastings College of Law) argues that doctrinal and theoretical debates about patent law have been fundamentally misconceived as being based on defining the boundaries of the rights of patent holders. In her view, patent law more correctly should be seen as merely creating opportunities to bargain over the definition of rights, as patents are established individually for each patent in the face of rapidly changing knowledge and meaning and thus could never provide a definitive and clearly bounded set of rights. Furthermore, the practical footprint of a patent holder's rights generally develops during licensing interactions, which themselves depend on factors related to the size of the company, its position relative to other companies, and the company's other assets. After critiquing current formulations of doctrine and theory, she expands upon her theory and then considers general implications for court treatments of patent law. She also addresses implications for specific contemporary questions, including whether software, genes, and business methods are proper subjects for patent law; the proper relationship between patent, antitrust, regulation, and contract law (illustrated with examples such as pharmaceutical patents); and whether the footprint of a patent should reach beyond the state of the art at the time of the invention (focusing in particular on inventions in the biomedical industry). Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Contents:

The bargain aspect of patents

How modern patents operate

Implications of the bargain aspect for current debates

Where do processes of nature end and processes of human inventions begin?

The interaction of patents with contracts & antitrust

Beyond the state of the art.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [215]-268) and index.

ISBN:

9780674064683

0674064682

OCLC:

756200231