This Piece describes a sophisticated but underreported system of mass-defendant intellectual property litigation called the “Schedule A Defendants Scheme” (the “SAD Scheme”), which occurs most frequently in the Northern District of Illinois and principally targets online merchants based in China. The SAD Scheme capitalizes on weak spots in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, judicial deference to IP rightsowners, and online marketplaces’...
Intellectual Property
This Essay problematizes the increased propertization and commodification of education and calls for a rethink of the emergent concept of “education theft” through the lens of intellectual property and human rights. This concept refers to the phenomenon where parents, or legal guardians, enroll children in schools outside their school districts by intentionally violating the residency requirements. The Essay begins by revisiting the debate...
The age of digital distribution exacerbates transaction costs in two distinct ways. First, the dissemination of large quantities of works requires permissions from myriad copyright holders. Second, new technologies lower the cost of content creation, resulting in millions of individual creators, rather than a discrete set of large industry repeat players. The potential of class actions to address this rising transaction cost problem has gone largely...
In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., the Supreme Court resurrected a nineteenth-century copyright doctrine—the government edicts doctrine—and applied it to statutory annotations prepared by a legislative agency. While the substance of the decision has serious implications for due process and the rule of law, the Court’s treatment of the doctrine recognized an invigorated role for courts in the development of copyright law through...
United States trademark law requires that a mark be used in commerce for it to qualify for registration at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). Applicants prove that they have met the use requirement by submitting to the PTO photographic specimens of their use of the mark in commerce. This Piece reports the results of new empirical work showing that an appreciable number of U.S. trademark applications originating in China...