Intellectual Property Law

Call for papers: Ebola and the law

Posted on October 04, 2020
Call for papers Ebola and the Law Biolaw section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS)Washington, D.C.Monday, January 5, 2015, 10:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. The 2014 west African outbreak of the Ebola virus is the most severe epidemic attributed to this pathogen since 1976, when international health officials began keeping records on Ebola...

Reel Bio-Horror

Posted on March 02, 2014
Victoria Sutton of Texas Tech very kindly put her new book, Reel Bio-Horror: The Things That Keep Us Up at Night, on the Biolaw bookshelf. The book has its own website and a Facebook fan page. It covers the genre of biohorror and biothriller movies, which depict infectious diseases, whether used as weapons or simply beyond human control, that wreak havoc and spawn terror...

PLI's EPA Compliance and Enforcement Answer Book for 2013

Posted on October 09, 2013
The Practising Law Institute has very kindly provided Biolaw a copy of its EPA Compliance and Enforcement Answer Book for 2013. Edited by by Adam Sowatzka and Richard E. Glaze, Jr., this volume reviews the full array of laws enforced by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, including federal laws that delegate enforcement authority to the states...

Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle

Posted on November 21, 2012
Recently received in the Jurisdynamics Network's mailbox: Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age (2011) (available at http://amzn.to/RaceBottle): At a ceremony announcing the completion of the first draft of the human genome in 2000, President Bill Clinton declared, "I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99...

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Synthesizing Law for Synthetic Biology

Posted on October 31, 2012
Earlier this year, I was commissioned by the National Academies to write a report on synthetic biology, standards setting, and intellectual property, which I co-authored with Linda Kahl, and presented at the National Academies in Washington, D.C., on October 4, 2012, as part of the Symposium on Management of Intellectual Property in Standard-Setting Processes...

Bioprospect theory

Posted on October 21, 2012
Jim Chen, Bioprospect Theory, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2164848 or http://bit.ly/BioprospectTheory. To be presented at the University of Akron School of Law's sixth annual Intellectual Property Scholars Forum. Conventional wisdom treats biodiversity and biotechnology as rivalrous values...

Walrus baby

Posted on October 20, 2012
Yes, walruses are charismatic megafauna, and biodiversity conservation means so much more than that. But it sure is fun to watch a 250-pound walrus baby, Mitik, frolic in his first days at the New York Aquarium. Hat tip to New York Times.

Portland finally fluoridates

Posted on September 14, 2012
After public debates spanning half a human lifespan, Portland, Oregon, has finally elected to fluoridate its water. Portland's city council has voted unanimously to add fluoride beginning in 2014, at a projected cost of $5 million. By any strictly scientific calculus of public health costs and benefits, this is an easy and obvious decision...

Diamond On Romney On Diamond

Posted on August 04, 2012
Mitt Romney, the presumptive 2012 Republican Party presidential candidate, recently invoked the scholarship of UCLA Professor Jared Diamond while visiting Israel.  On July 29, 2012, in a speech at a fundraiser in Jerusalem, he interpreted Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel as "basically say[ing that] the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there...

Synagriculture

Posted on June 28, 2012
Agriculture stands on the verge of another technological transformation.  Just as genetically-modified crops and livestock have begun to achieve normality in the eyes of most, an even more radical approach to agriculture has arrived.  Synthetic biology combines de novo design of genes, cells, and organisms with an ethos of user, open, and collaborative innovation...

Copyright To Life

Posted on April 12, 2012
In his 1993 book, The Language of the Genes:  Biology, History and the Evolutionary Future, British biologist, John Stephen Jones, concisely conveys the linguistic function of DNA, as follows: The language of the genes has a simple alphabet, not with twenty-six letters, but just four...

On Prometheus The Tempest Falls

Posted on March 21, 2012
The article, Physiological Steps Doctrine, published in 2009 in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal (and available free on SSRN), suggested that patents claiming aspects of human physiological processes are not upheld in court.  Here is the abstract of Physiological Steps Doctrine:In vivo conversion is a process, often metabolic in nature, wherein one substance, usually a chemical compound, is altered significantly by physiological pathways in the body into one or more different substances...

Innovation Incentives Part 3: Combining Innovation Index and Product Cluster Models

Posted on January 12, 2012
Understanding the Consequences of Linking Market and Regulatory Incentives for Drug Development: Part 3Editor's note: This is the third installment of a three-part series.In Parts 1 and 2, we learned that it is both possible and valuable to import empirical scientific methods typically used in the hard sciences to the study of law...

Innovation Incentives Part 2: Patent Valuation

Posted on January 03, 2012
Understanding the Consequences of Linking Market and Regulatory Incentives for Drug Development: Part 2Editor's note: This is the second installment of a three-part series.In new work by our group, we have outlined a tandem of new methodological tools to identify and quantify new and follow-on drugs and patent valuation...

Innovation Incentives Part 1: Regulated Therapeutic Product Lifecycle

Posted on December 03, 2011
Understanding the Consequences of Linking Market and Regulatory Incentives for Drug Development: Part 1This is a three-part series by guest blogger Ron A. Bouchard.Dr Ron A. Bouchard is an intellectual property lawyer and scholar, specializing in biomedical products...

Secret Salmon Science

Posted on December 01, 2011
As one of the brothers in Lewis Carroll's The Two Brothers laments,Take my friends and my home - as an outcast I'll roam: Take the money I have in the bank: It is just what I wish, but deprive me of fish, And my life would indeed be blank.This ichthyophile brother would surely be alarmed at the crisis now facing wild salmon stocks on the Pacific coast of North America...

IPAT Baby Seven Billion

Posted on December 01, 2011
With the seven billionth living human being imminent, it is important to consider that numbers of people alone do not explain the environmental impact Homo sapiens have on the earth.  Developed by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology John Holdren, and others back in the 1970s, the IPAT formula provides a useful lens through which to view Mr...

"We eat animals because they taste good"

Posted on September 26, 2011
. . . and other arguments in a spirited debate over the ethics of killing animals for food, fur, and/or leather.

Weldon Amendment Welded Onto The Patent Act

Posted on September 16, 2011
In 2004, the Consolidated Appropriations Act (Public Law Number 108-199, Section 199) was passed with the "Weldon Amendment" (named for its sponsor, former Republican Congressman Dr. Dave Weldon), a rider stipulating that "[n]one of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available under this Act may be used to issue patents on claims directed to or encompassing a human organism...

Polycentrism, Fragmentation, and the Role of Linkages in the Decade on Biodiversity

Posted on August 12, 2011
The United Nations has declared 2011-2020 the Decade on Biodiversity and the Convention on Biological Diversity has adopted a Strategic Plan for this period. The plan suggests an emphasis on national and regional action with support from the international level...

Myriad Genes To Patent

Posted on August 02, 2011
The United States Supreme Court must be despairing of how many patent appeals are coming its way.  After all, patent law is few people's cup of tea.  As one old, though obscure, joke puts it:Question:  What's the difference between a patent attorney and a tax attorney?Answer:  Patent attorneys are like tax attorneys, but without the scintillating personalities!Watch out, Supremes, because the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit may have just teed you up to grant yet another writ of certiorari in a patent case...

When Patents Attack

Posted on August 02, 2011
This American Life, a quirky and wonderful weekly radio program on National Public Radio, has featured stories on comedians, how to speak to kids, psychopaths, unconditional love, and mind games.  On July 22, 2011, TAL investigated a special breed of trolls:  patent trolls...

Toxodebtosis

Posted on August 02, 2011
Toxoplasmosis is a fascinatingly tragic condition.  A mouse infected by the protoctistan, Toxoplasma gondii, behaves strangely.  Instead of scampering away at the first whiff of feline scent, as an uninfected murine certainly would, the mouse is dangerously attracted to eau de chat...

Prometheus Rebound To The Supreme Court

Posted on July 07, 2011
On its second opportunity, the United States Supreme Court has granted a writ of certiorari to hear an appeal of Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Services and Mayo Clinic Rochester ("Prometheus v. Mayo"), a decision by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ("Federal Circuit") that ratified - for the second time - the patentability of methods to determine optimal drug dosage levels in therapeutic treatments...

These geese will be cooked

Posted on June 15, 2011
Canada geese represent a serious urban menace. Their molting season presents local governments a short, annual window of opportunity to respond by culling geese en masse. After an outcry over the failure in 2010 to convert culled geese into low-cost, high-protein food, New York officials will not consign this year's harvest to the landfill...

Après Loi Le Déluge

Posted on March 12, 2011
Preparing for rare natural disasters, such as the massive earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, is vitally important, if human tragedies are to be minimized.  The invention of technologies useful in disasters, such as earthquake-resilient buildings, pharmaceutical drugs to treat outbreaks of disease, and even logistical methods, may be spurred by policy tools as diverse as patents, innovation prizes, and protection for open, user, and collaborative innovation...

Association for Law, Property and Society

Posted on March 05, 2011
I have just returned from the wonderful 2nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Law, Property and Society. An excellent array of papers from the conference is available here. The 3rd Annual Meeting will be held March 2-3, 2012 -- highly recommended for attorenys, law professors, and social scientists with an interest in property law and its relationship to society!

Call Me Ishmael No Longer

Posted on February 21, 2011
The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling ("ICRW") was intended to promote, not discourage, whaling.  Countries engaged in commercial whaling, concerned about precipitous declines of many whale populations negotiated, and, on December 2, 1946, signed, the ICRW to ensure the "proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry...

Expansion of the Government Provision of Health Care and Individual Rights: Panacea or Pandora?s Box?

Posted on February 16, 2011
?The proposal that promoting and protecting human rights is inextricably linked to the challenge of promoting and protecting health derives in part from ecognition that health and human rights are complementary approaches to the central problem of defending and advancing human well-being...

Eight-Track Tape, Meet Three-Track Patent

Posted on February 05, 2011
A lot can happen in five years.  One could write a great novel - or two.  One could run around the world.  One could complete an MD degree, and begin saving lives.  One could get pregnant, have a baby, watch that baby learn to crawl, walk, talk, and read, and begin kindergarten...

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