The Patent Utility Requirement and Its Impact on Alternative Medical Treatments for Lyme Disease
Sarah Murphy Alternative medicine has made its way to the forefront of medical innovation, changing the way both doctors and patients approach complex health issues. Patenting medical inventions promotes advancement by increasing the exchange of vital information. This crucial benefit to society is particularly important for patients suffering from chronic illnesses who are dissatisfied with conventional medicine. Though the patent system requires that patented inventions are “useful,” there is no guarantee that the product is effective or even safe to use. The medical field must grapple with this trade-off between the benefit of new treatments made easily available to people...
Liability of Tesla’s Autopilot System Under California Tort Law
Jamin Xu On September 19, 2016, the U.S. Department of Transportation (“DOT”) published federal policy guidelines on automated vehicles in which it expressed its support for the development of autonomous vehicles and stated the potential of autonomous vehicles to drastically improve people’s safety and mobility. In order to address safety concerns, the Department released guidelines instructing states to close the gap between regulations that govern human-driven vehicles from self-driving ones by allocating tort liability among Highly Automated Vehicle (“HAV”) owners, operators, passengers, manufacturers and others when a crash occurs, while providing very little guidance in doing so. This approach encourages...
Dilemma of Trade Dress, Informational Values and Enigmatic Distinctiveness; Semiotics Illuminating the Status of Distinctiveness
Qadir Qeidary Part I of the present article seeks to as a matter of fact assess trade dress’s potentiality of communicating information within an informative context. In that part, we try to explain that how and to what extent trade dress as a visual indicator is capable of meeting the trademark system’s goals by serving the richer and easier information to retrieve. Moreover, we show that how trade dress’s more effective abilities could positively affect the producers and consumers’ economic interests. Read Full Text Here
YouTube’s ContentID Copyright Infringement Flagging System: Using Its Corporate-Assuaging Origins in Viacom v. YouTube as a Jumping-Off Point for the Way It’s Been Used and Altered over the Years
Emily Tate The idiosyncrasy of the Internet often invites colorful analogies in its description: high seas and piracy, Wild West and lawless frontier. This is not undeserved; despite great strides over the course of its development, the Internet remains unexamined and unregulated in many ways, and the regulations that do exist are largely self-governed. Copyright law in particular has proven contentious for lawmakers who are forced to balance digital rights management on a massive scale with the rights of end users. Nowhere is this conflict more apparent than in the practices of the video-sharing juggernaut YouTube. Read Full Text Here
The Defend Trade Secrets Act: Will the Landmark Waymo v. Uber Case Give It Teeth?
Avery Minor The Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) was passed with bipartisan support in 2016 to federalize trade secret protection. Previously, only states could authorize these types of suits, leading to dissimilar outcomes as a result of different state laws. Because it is still in its infancy with very little precedence, federal courts have continued to gloss over the significance of the DTSA and address trade secret cases using state law alone. The heavily publicized case involving stolen trade secrets between two prominent technology companies, Waymo v. Uber, has given the court a chance to assert the relevance of the...
Allergan’s Battle to Stay in Court: Does Inter Partes Review Violate the Constitution by Circumventing Courtroom Adjudication?
Ashley E. Petrarca Since its institution in 2011, inter partes review has caused considerable disruption in the intellectual property world, with some industry players questioning the process’ constitutionality. One of these players is Dublin-based pharmaceutical company Allergan, Inc., which asserts that it is unfair to force patent owners to defend their USPTO-granted patent rights before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”), a non-Article III sanctioned forum. Central to this debate is the question of whether patents confer private or public rights. This article discusses both sides of the dialogue over inter partes review constitutionality, and postulates that the process...
Copyright Issues and Implications of Emerging Virtual Reality Technologies
Lauren E. Beausoleil Virtual reality (“VR”) technologies allow users to experience three-dimensional, multi-sensory environments (“virtual worlds”). This new and rapidly-developing technological platform is promising, but does not come without legal challenges. Issues regarding copyrights for virtual worlds and creations within those worlds can be expected. This article involves an exploration into potential application of copyright law to virtual reality technologies, focusing on what might be protected by copyright, potential infringement challenges, and how enforcement of these copyrights might play out for both users and developers. Read Full Text Here
FTC Social Media Endorsement Guidelines: The Effects on Social Media Users and Business Owners
Jason Kim In the midst of heydays of social media, a social media user will inevitably face a product or service endorsement post in his/her social media feed or thread page. However, in the endorsement post, it is quite rare to see disclosure information as to whether the social media endorser has some kind of commercial relationship with the product manufacturer or service provider. On September 7, 2017 the FTC issued its first ever legal action against individual social media endorsers for posting endorsement posts without revealing their commercial relationship with the service providing company. This action by the FTC...
Interoperability’s Role in Striving for Precision Medicine
Martha Koroshetz President Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative in his 2015 State of the Union address, a research effort to find treatments that are tailored to specific genetic profiles and characteristics. This personalized and context-specific treatment approach will require big data analysis of patient outcomes and their genetic sequence, which must then be accessible and comprehensible to caregivers. The initiative must therefore be able to reconcile genetic data, demographic information, and health information, in the electronic health record. To achieve data interoperability, the organizations engaged in the initiative must confront questions of data privacy, standardize data exchange, and incentivize...
ISP Regulation and Antitrust: The Case for Better Competition
David Yangli Wang This Note firstly discusses net neutrality and ISP regulations broadly– do we see it as a commerce issue, a government regulation issue, a data fairness issue, or even a human rights issue? And if we decide that ISPs must be regulated, what type of antitrust regulation will be most effective? This Note takes a comparative look at Internet regulations around the world, examining both the development of broadband infrastructures and the antitrust laws (or lack thereof) of such countries. This Note ultimately concludes that the current antitrust regime in the United States will not be able to...