Discusses how the American patent system, once the best in the world, was corrupted by big technology companies and unwise court decisions.

The protection of AI-assisted and AI-generated works causes problems for existing intellectual property law. However, it is doubtful whether the purposes of patent law would be served by granting patents for AI-generated inventions. Further, AI systems are unable to make the creative choices to bring their outputs into the realm of copyright protection. However, with AI-assisted outputs, there may still be sufficient creative choices by the programmer or user to bring the output into the domain of IP protection. AI fundamentally challenges the anthropocentric copyright regime. AI technologies will require us to rethink fundamental concepts within IP law, including, for instance, the standard of obviousness applied within patent law.

The problems referred to in the title of this chapter concern evaluating a given variable when it is one of several that have combined to bring about a result. In some cases, there is an easy market solution. Imagine that you contract to buy a house and then the beautiful kitchen stove, one of many things that attracted you to the property, is destroyed before you close the transaction or occupy the property. How much should the price now be reduced? Here there is an upper limit based on the cost of a comparable replacement appliance. A more precise valuation would also be easy if identical houses, lacking this one feature, had recently been sold. The stove is just a piece of the larger transaction and, with these convenient facts, there is not much of a “component valuation problem.” Additionally, the stove is unlikely to have been of greater value because of its interaction with other items in the house; colors and sizes are fairly standardized. “Conjoint analysis” – a term that usually refers to survey evidence that tries to elicit the value of a component – is therefore unnecessary, or at least uncomplicated, because value does not depend on an interaction among variables in a way that is not directly observed. It is also interesting because it does not present a difficult game theory problem, or result that might be described in common parlance as something that depends on the relative bargaining skill of the parties.

In recent years, there have been many accounts of extreme prescription drug prices that have raised issues of equity, price gouging, social conscience, and demands for relief. In part, these prices arise due to the inelastic demand for lifesaving drugs and the patents that create short-term legal monopolies. The economic rationale for patent protection flows from the fact that the investment made by inventors necessarily precedes any financial benefits received from the discovery of new products or more efficient production processes. Patent law prevents copiers from free riding so that innovators can reap the reward of monopoly profits for their innovation. Thus, there is a trade-off between innovation and affordability. Antitrust law cannot be used to disrupt legal monopolies, so the US government has turned to congressional proposals that would mitigate extreme drug pricing. We also review the policies of other countries that are aimed at reducing pharmaceutical drug prices and consider whether such policies would work in the US market.

This chapter is structured into three main sections. Section 4.2 provides a brief overview of the legal framework on pharmaceutical patent law in Kenya. Section 4.3 deals with the key issue in this chapter, that is, the incorporation of a model of human rights into the adjudication of disputes involving pharmaceutical patent rights by courts in Kenya. Section 4.4 examines whether, in the light of Article 40(5) of the Kenyan Constitution which provides that the state ‘shall support, promote and protect the intellectual property rights of the people of Kenya’, intellectual property rights can be considered as a human right in Kenya. The chapter concludes with the view that it is essential for courts seeking to protect the right of poor patients to have access to affordable medicines to incorporate a model of human rights when they adjudicate disputes involving pharmaceutical patent rights.

This chapter traces a rising national consciousness in English law and legal institutions, focusing on the implications of this for the broader shift from medieval privileges to modern intellectual property. The shift is presented through a narrative highlighting the roots of Parliament in the legal principles and transcendent appeals established in the wake of thirteenth century baronial revolts. We see the impacts of this nationalizing legal revolution in the thought-world of the great monastic chroniclers at the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans. And we see the historical legacy of this nationalizing legal revolution in the rise of statutory supremacy and positive legality. These interrelated developments occurred through processes of semantic legal ordering, in which Parliament appropriated traditional rights of prerogative kingship and the church, establishing itself as the guardian of property owned by an increasingly-vocal class of subjects invested (materially and spiritually) in the Protestant Reformation. Two statutory foundations for modern intellectual property resulted from these complex developments: the Statute of Monopolies (1624) and the Statute of Anne (1710).

The German patent system launched in 1877 has usually been treated merely as a later variant of the Anglo-American system. Yet the German system was novel in allowing both State and judiciary unprecedented discretion to constrain the rights claims of inventors, with prolonged debates on the abstract principles that should guide the legal frameworks of patenting practice. Moreover, due to the economic power of Germany in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, neighboring nations tended to follow its patent model to a significant extent. The success of the Germanic system in its variant forms thus a significant factor in the rapid subsequent development of patent systems in Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe. As German patent theorists continued to debate the statutory rationales for patents as a species of intellectual property for half a century, the variety of ideological interpretations to which the German system was susceptible was another reason why other nation-states drew upon it in developing their own distinctive forms of patent legislation.

The co-construction of “industrial property” law and the culture of invention in Greece occurred most prominently from the first patent law of 1920 up to World War II. I unravel the political and industrial contexts of the emergence of Greece’s first patent law, focusing on the role of engineering figures both in framing patent rights as a privilege conferred upon inventors and in pressing toward new legislation. The resulting 1920 patent law was an incomplete attempt to represent the legal status of patents in terms of rights rather than of privilege. The new Greek law that emerged was thus a compromise between ideological pressures for homogenization and the need to innovate through imitation. Overall this chapter contextualizes this development within the impact of transnational patent legislation in constructing a culture of propertization of knowledge and more particularly in techno-science in Greece. The research is based mainly on published archival material most importantly on technical and legal journals, public press, and legal books of the period.

A building body of evidence reveals that the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) is granting a significant number of invalid patents that create inefficiencies and chill innovation. At least part of the blame can be placed on the design of the patent system, which places most of the costs associated with understanding the nature and novelty of a claim on the government patent examiner, rather than on the inventor. After considering how a range of inventors might react to this incentive system, we consider reforms that place stronger incentives on the inventor to justify a patent award.

Consumer protection law is notoriously imbalanced with respect to the superior ability of sellers to process information as compared to their customers. Yet despite the resulting comprehension asymmetries, the design of consumer contract law and disclosure requirements regularly fail to encourage sellers to communicate meaningfully with the target audience. This chapter explores how consumer protection law tacitly encourages incomprehensibility and proposes reforms which would provide increased incentives for meaningful communication between buyers and sellers.