Intellectual Property: Private Rights, the Public Interest, and the Regulation of Creative Activity (American Casebook Series)

This book provides an overview of trademark, patent, and copyright doctrine and offers a foray into more advanced topics, such as digital rights management, international law, and state doctrinal developments in both civil and criminal law. Particularly important is a final chapter that develops the "new horizons" of intellectual property, covering topics such as open source software, intellectual property and business development, protections for traditional knowledge, and competition policy. This casebook is targeted to a wide range of law students, including both those who are technologically inclined and those who are interested in all forms of creativity and expression. The new edition expands on the strengths of the first edition. Chapters on copyright and trademark are reorganized to make them more readable and include more on digital rights management. The new edition covers recent IP issues in biotechnology, termination rights under copyright, search engines, the Google book project and the YouTube vs. Viacom case. The role of economic incentives in copyright and patent law is more extensively discussed, along with new treatments of post-grant patent proceedings, new media for public performance of copyrighted works, and digital copyrights. This edition is also supplemented by an extensive set of self-assessment questions (and answers) prepared by the authors, which are designed to provide feedback to students on their understanding of overall intellectual property concepts and of the specific contents of every chapter.