From Gene Patents to Biomedical Materials
By Lisa Larrimore Ouellette
Patents claiming DNA sequences have been subject to extensive public and scholarly criticism due to their potential to impede innovation and to restrict access to affordable healthcare. Recent empirical studies, however, indicate that access to materials is a much more serious problem than patents are for basic biomedical researchers, and access to materials is also a critical problem for producers of biomedical end products like biopharmaceuticals. This Note argues that these physical research tools should be included in a more expansive concept of “bio-knowledge,” and that solving the access to materials problem is critical for increasing biomedical innovation. This problem has been caused in part by changing norms among basic researchers, but fully undoing the commercialization of university research is neither possible nor desirable. Instead, partial solutions may be found within the patent system, both through reducing the transaction costs associated with material transfers and through increased use of official material depositories by both basic and industrial researchers.
Posted in Notes.
March 12, 2010 – Cite: 2010 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. N1
A Guide for the Perplexed
By Owen D. Jones, Joshua W. Buckholtz, Jeffrey D. Schall and Rene Marois
It has become increasingly common for brain images to be proffered as evidence in civil and criminal litigation. This Article offers some general guidelines to legal thinkers about how to understand brain imaging studies—or at least avoid misunderstanding them. And it annotates a published brain imaging study by several of the present authors (and others) in order to illustrate and explain, with step-by-step commentary.
Posted in Articles.
December 14, 2009 – Cite: 2009 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 5
Access To Experts, Competency To Consent, And The Impact Of Antipsychotic Medications In Neuroimaging Cases In The Criminal Trial Process
By Michael Perlin
Last fall, I presented a paper at a conference on neuroimaging and the law looking at the way jurors were likely to construe neuroimaging evidence in insanity defense cases. I tried to balance jurors’ likely positive response to the perceived characteristics of this evidence—vivid, objective, quantifiable, advanced—with their likely negative response to the use of this evidence in such cases (reflecting their prejudice, hostility, and hatred toward insanity pleaders)—and concluded that I was “not at all sure that the pizzazz of neuroimaging testimony—not withstanding its colorfulness and its propensity to reductionism—will trump these deep-seated attitudes.” In short, I sought to make the point that the science of neuroscience has to be assessed in the sociopolitical context of the specific question of law that is central to the specific case before the court. Continued…
Posted in Articles.
November 13, 2009 – Cite: 2009 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 4
Why We Should, and How We Can, Limit Surveillance of Digital Reading Habits
By Thomas Nosewicz
It is not alarmist to say that the Internet is the first truly panoptic system of the mind. Dumbfoundingly dense databanks can—and do—gorge themselves on one’s every move across a webpage. Web tools monitor every specific article a visitor reads, how she was referred to that article, and how long she spent reading it. These tools allow website owners to compile a comprehensive set of statistics about visitors to their websites, including how often they visit, their domains and countries of origin, what pages they view the most, and the operating system and web browser they use to access the website. This surveillance is omnipresent, all-knowing, and perfectly concealed. Continued…
Posted in Notes.
April 9, 2009 – Cite: 2009 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. N1
Fully Scoping the New Rule
By Bernard Chao
In exchange for granting inventors a limited monopoly, the patent laws require inventors to “enable” the public to make and use their invention. In Liebel-Flarsheim Co. v. Medrad, Inc., Automotive Technologies International, Inc. v. BMW of North America, Inc., and Sitrick v. Dreamworks, L.L.C., the Federal Circuit made it far easier to show that patents are invalid based on lack of enablement in the predictable arts. These decisions rely on the enablement doctrine to invalidate claims that appear to be far broader in scope than what the written description of the patents suggests. Continued…
Posted in Articles.
March 23, 2009 – Cite: 2009 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 3
Conditioning §230 Safe Harbor on the Provision of a Site "Rating"
By Caitlin Hall
Whatever lip service we may pay to those spaces “immemorially . . . held in trust for the use of the public,” the Internet is operatively the most important public forum ever created. Its vast interconnectivity far more nearly approximates the prototypical “marketplace of ideas” than do warring politicos duking it out on the op-ed pages or, for that matter, in opposing briefs. However, the very features that make the internet fertile ground for cultural and political discourse—anonymity and pseudonymity; intellectual symbiosis and parasitism; fractal sprawl, audience dispersal and many-to-many architecture—render it a treacherous landscape for its custodians. In recognition of that fact, Congress in 1996 passed the Communications Decency Act, which nearly eliminated the liability that website administrators face for third-party generated content. Continued…
Posted in Notes.
December 9, 2008 – Cite: 2008 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. N1
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