Notes: Preface

1. U.S. Patent No. 6,004,596 (filed Dec. 21, 1999), available at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm (search “6,004,596”). As is required, the patent refers extensively to the “prior art”—in this case prior art in sealing sandwiches. It also refers to the classic scientific reference work “50 Great Sandwiches by Carole Handslip 81–84, 86, 95, 1994.” Is this patent ridiculous? Yes, clearly so. But not so ridiculous that its eventual owner, Smucker’s, refrained from sending out cease and desist letters to competing sandwich manufacturers, and, when one of those competitors successfully requested the Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine the patent, from appealing the resulting rejection all the way through the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The judges there were less than sympathetic at oral argument. “Judge Arthur Gajarsa noted that his wife often squeezes together the sides of their child’s peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to keep the filling from oozing out. ‘I’m afraid she might be infringing on your patent!’ he said.” The court found that the PTO got it right the second time around and agreed with the Board of Patent Appeals in rejecting the patent. Portfolio Media, “Peanut Butter and Jelly Case Reaches Federal Circuit,” IPLaw360 (April 7, 2005), available at http://www.iplawbulletin.com. For the Board of Patent Appeals’s learned discussion of whether the patent was anticipated by such devices as the “Tartmaster,” complete with disputes over expert testimony on the subjects of cutting, crimping, and “leaking outwardly” and painstaking inquiries about what would seem obvious to a “person having ordinary skill in the art of sandwich making,” see http://des.uspto.gov/Foia/ReterivePdf?system=BPAI&flNm=fd031754 and http://des.uspto.gov/Foia/Reterive-Pdf?system=BPAI&flNm=fd031775. One could conclude from this case that the system works (eventually). Or one could ask who cares about silly patents like this—even if they are used in an attempt to undermine competition? The larger point, however, is that an initial process of examination that finds a crimped peanut butter and jelly sandwich is “novel and nonobvious” is hardly going to do better when more complex technologies are at stake. I take that point up in Chapter 2 with reference to Thomas Jefferson’s discussion of patents and in Chapter 7 on synthetic biology. For a more general discussion of the flaws of the patent system see Adam B. Jaffe and Josh Lerner, Innovation and Its Discontents:How Our Broken Patent System Is Endangering Innovation, and Progress and What To Do About It (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).

2. These types of patents are discussed in Chapter 7.

3. San Francisco Arts & Athletics, Inc., et al. v. United States Olympic Committee, 483 U.S. 522 (1987). See also James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 145–148.

4. SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co., 268 F.3d 1257 (11th Cir. 2001).

5. See Samuel E. Trosow, “Sui Generis Database Legislation: A Critical Analysis,” Yale Journal of Law & Technology 7 (2005): 534–642; Miriam Bitton, “Trends in Protection for Informational Works under Copyright Law during the 19th and 20th Centuries,” Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review 13 (2006): 115–176.

6. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is discussed at length in Chapter 5. “Digital fences” include password protection, encryption, and forms of digital rights management.

7. Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Inc. v. Pussycat Cinema, Ltd., 604 F.2d 200 (2nd Cir. 1979).

8. “In the forests of Panama lives a Guyami Indian woman who is unusually resistant to a virus that causes leukemia. She was discovered by scientific ‘gene hunters,’ engaged in seeking out native peoples whose lives and cultures are threatened with extinction. Though they provided basic medical care, the hunters did not set out to preserve the people, only their genes—which can be kept in cultures of ‘immortalized’ cells grown in the laboratory. In 1993, the U.S. Department of Commerce tried to patent the Guyami woman’s genes—and only abandoned the attempt in the face of furious protest from representatives of indigenous peoples.” Tom Wilkie, “Whose Gene Is It Anyway?” Independent (London, November 19, 1995), 75.

9. See Christina Rhee, “Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 13 (1998): 69–81.

10. See James Boyle, “Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person’s Guide,” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 10 (1996): 83–94.

11. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248.

12. International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215, 250 (1918) (Brandeis, J., dissenting);Yochai Benkler, “Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain,” New York University Law Review 74 (1999): 354–446.