Posts Tagged: "JMLS"

John Marshall Law School’s 62nd Annual IP Conference

The John Marshall Law School is proud to present its 62nd Annual Intellectual Property Law Conference. This one-day conference covers developments in patent, trade secrets, antitrust, trademarks, copyrights, IP management and in-house counsel practice, entertainment, and information technology and privacy law. Last year, we expanded the scope of our long-standing IP event, moving from principally single-speaker sessions to panels, with…

Standard Essential Patents, Antitrust and Market Power

Antitrust agency communications, such as the EU Commission’s Horizontal Guidelines and the FTC/DOJ Licensing Guidelines underline that market power does not necessarily result from patent ownership as such. They contain, however, no specific language on standard-essential patents which are – if they are valid and truly standard-essential – different from other patents in that they must, by definition, be used in order to operate on the respective standard-based market. In Europe at least, it seems to be increasingly accepted that SEPs can convey market power but that they do not necessarily always do so. Advocate General Wathelet’s proposition (para. 57 et seq. of his opinion in the Huawei/ZTE case) to establish a rebuttable presumption that SEP ownership generates market power has not been taken up by the CJEU’s Huawei/ZTE-decision, probably because the parties already agreed that Huawei held a dominant position (para. 43). But court decisions from the UK (for instance Unwired Planet/Huawei, a summary of the case is provided here) and Germany (for instance LG Düsseldorf, 26.3.2015, 4b O 140/13) have taken a case-sensitive approach, looking not only at the leverage generated by a SEP but also at circumstances which may limit its holder’s power.

Judge Pauline Newman, Don Dunner Headline John Marshall Law School IP Law Conference

Scott Kieff: “My biggest take from today’s sessions, was to hear from Don Dunner and Judge Newman and others about that great ideas that we could all share in to bring increased economic growth, increased innovation, increased opportunity for the market, for consumers and for manufacturing by returning to an approach to the IP Antitrust interface that is politically diverse, that both President’s Carter and Reagan embraced. That kind of pivoting could really help the system and it could be done by getting professionals within the community to just talk together in a different way. I know that sounds small because it’s just talking, and talking in a different way. But sometimes those little things can have big payoffs.”

Trade Secret Policy and Election Companies

There is some conflict with trade secrecy policy application to private election companies and a desire for transparency in government. When the issue is as critical to the interaction between the citizens and their government as elections are, the policy behind trade secrets must be examined to determine whether an exception should be made. Transparency is generally a desired trait in government. It is a means of holding elected officials accountable for their actions and reducing corruption among those officials. If the consequences are serious enough, there are exceptions to the desire for government transparency, however, such as when national security is determined to be at stake. Government itself does not necessarily suffer consequences for lack of innovation if not granted trade secret protection of its governmental secrets and the public policy reasons do not apply as much.

Trade Secrets and Election Companies: Private Companies in Government Elections

Voting machine companies have responded to these requirements with streamlined computerized equipment, running more sophisticated software than ever before. Many states upgraded their voting equipment to Direct Electronic Voting systems (“DREs”). These systems offer the benefit of easy-to-use interfaces that allow voters to make their selections efficiently and effectively. They raise accountability and reliability issues, however, as they store their vote totals in computer memory… In recent cases, courts in North Carolina and Florida have held that despite problems encountered with election equipment, election companies are entitled to maintain their trade secrets. On this reasoning, the source code of voting machine software is shielded from discovery.