by Jason Rantanen & Lee Petherbridge & Jay P. Kesan
In September 2011, President Obama signed the most significant patent law overhaul in decades, the America Invents Act. The central change of the Act is to shift patent rights from the first to invent to the first to file, but the act also provides immunity for claims that an inventor deceived the Patent Office if the invention is not patentable. Professor Petherbridge and Professor Rantanen take on these changes, arguing that despite the stated goal of the Act, to stimulate innovation and job creation in the American economy, the Act may well do just the opposite. In response, Professor Kesan examines other sections of the Act, arguing that they provide more reason to be optimistic, and questioning whether the reasons Professors Petherbridge and Rantanen are pessimistic truly can be evaluated without better empirical evidence.
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FEATURED RESPONSE
by Susan W. Brenner
I was honored to be asked to respond to Professor Bellin’s insightful article, Facebook, Twitter, and the Uncertain Future of Present Sense Impressions. Since I agree with much of what he says, my Response is limited to two tasks: parsing the relationship between modes of communication and the present sense impression exception, and assessing the extent to which at least certain types of electronic communication might be incorporated into the percipient witness requirement he proposes...I have, for well over a decade, devoted much of my time to researching and writing about how our use of cyberspace sometimes requires us to modify existing legal rules but often does not. As I explain when I speak and write on this topic, law—except for specialized areas such as patent and copyright—is concerned with people, not with technology, as such. Given that, I believe we need to be careful not to overestimate the impact technology has on existing law; in many instances, it may be possible to accommodate uses of technology with rules as they exist or by tweaking them only slightly.
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