C-IP2 produces research, education, and service at the intersection of IP and innovation policy to better understand and shape the means of innovation as a positive force for good. We do so by promoting a diverse set of perspectives and voices to present a fuller picture than that of the dominant legal academic literature on the role of IP and other legal mechanisms to transform great ideas into useful or aesthetic artifacts and activities.
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
C-IP2 Annual Fall Conference
The Importance of Exclusive Rights
Thursday, October 17, &
Friday, October 18, 2024
Hosted in person at Mason Square Campus
in Arlington, VA
— APPROVED for 9 Hours of VA CLE —
C-IP2’s 2024 Annual Conference will explore the importance of exclusive rights in the patent and copyright industries, the historical basis for those rights, and what happens to innovators and creators if the rights are not protected.
We are pleased to announce that this year’s conference will feature Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Kathi Vidal as our Keynote speaker on Friday, October 18.
2025-2026 Thomas Edison Innovation Law and Policy Fellowship: Call for Applications
Now entering its eleventh iteration (2025-2026), C-IP2’s Thomas Edison Innovation Law and Policy Fellowship is a year-long non-resident fellowship program that brings together a group of scholars to develop research papers on innovation law and policy. The Edison Fellowship is one of the centerpieces of C-IP2’s mission to promote a better academic discussion about intellectual property rights with substantial scholarship produced from rigorous research that examines the moral and economic value of innovation.
Submission Deadline for 2025-2025:
5 PM Eastern on Wednesday, November 27, 2024
— Learn about the Fellowship and apply —
C-IP2 Fall 2024 Progress Report
(June – August 2024)
See what C-IP2 and our Friends and Affiliates have been
doing, saying, and writing over the past several months!
New Blog Post by Prof. Justin Hughes
— Read the Blog Post in Full —
A new blog post from Professor Justin Hughes (Hon. William Matthew Byrne, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law; Fulbright-Hanken Distinguished Chair in Business and Economics, Loyola University School of Law) discusses the “NO FAKES Act: Unpacking the New Bipartisan Bill on Digital Replicas.”
This post was originally published on the Patently-O blog and is cross-posted here with permission from both Patently-O and the author.
New Blog Post on AI and Authorship
— Read the Blog Post in Full —
A new blog post from Molly Torsen Stech discusses the idea that “Authors are Humans and Creativity is a Function of Humanness: What the Mannion Court Can Teach Us About Generative AI’s Relationship to Authorship” and features her forthcoming paper Copyright Thickness, Thinness, and a Mannion Test for Images Produced by Generative Artificial Intelligence Applications.
In Response to the PTO
“In Response to Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Terminal Disclaimer Practice to Obviate Nonstatutory Double Patenting”: Professor Emily Michiko Morris, Professor Mark F. Schultz, and Joshua Kresh have filed comments objecting to the USPTO’s “proposed changes to terminal disclaimers and their use to overcome obviousness-type double patenting objections.”
C-IP2 Summer 2024 Progress Report
(March – May 2024)
See what C-IP2 and our Friends and Affiliates have been
doing, saying, and writing over the past several months!
New Blog Post:
“Pharmaceutical ‘Nominal Patent Life’ Versus ‘Effective Patent Life,’ Revisited”
By Emily Michiko Morris & Joshua Kresh
— Read the Blog Post in Full —
Executive summary: Many critics of pharmaceutical companies argue that they abuse the patent system through “evergreening” or “thickets” to increase the amount of time they can avoid generic competition and keep drug prices high. Those critics have not looked at the real-world effects of pharmaceutical patents on generic entry, however. Our review of actual time to generic entry for more than one hundred of 2012’s top-selling drugs shows that:
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- The average effective patent life, as opposed to nominal patent life, of our dataset is 13.35 years, consistent previous studies on effective patent life;
- Patents and exclusivities added to the Orange Book after a drug’s market entry does little to extend effective patent life; and
- The number of patents protecting a brand-name drug has no significant correlation with effective patent life.
Thus, our study suggests that “evergreening” does not stop generic entry and that “thickets”—if they even exist—appear to be rather easy to circumvent.
2024 WIPO-U.S. Summer School on Intellectual Property
June 3 – 14, 2024 (Weekdays Only)
Virtual
The Center for Intellectual Property x Innovation Policy (C-IP2) at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School is partnering with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to host the seventh iteration of the WIPO-U.S. Summer School on Intellectual Property. We are also grateful to USIPA for their partnership to help market this event!
This exclusive, two-week summer course will be held online only to accommodate participants from all over the world. U.S. law students can also receive three hours of academic credit from Scalia Law for this course.
– Learn More –