Patent Law: Cases & Materials

Abstract

I use these materials to teach a 3-credit Patent Law & Policy course. Many, but not all, of the students in such a course will already have taken an IP Survey course of some kind. Although I have minimized overlapping cases with the patent-law chapter of Loren & Miller’s Intellectual Property Law: Cases & Materials (Semaphore Press), students are bound to benefit from reviewing concepts they learned in an IP Survey.

This collection contains edited cases and selected patent figures and excerpts, along with brief introductions to some of the subjects it covers. The most important thing to keep in mind, however, is that this set of cases and materials is not designed as a self-contained, free-standing casebook. Rather, I have designed it for use in close conjunction with a specific softcover hornbook published by Wolters Kluwer, Janice Mueller’s Patent Law, Fourth Edition (Aspen Student Treatise Series 2013). At the start of each new topic, I have indicated which pages of Mueller’s Patent Law are most relevant to the cases I present. My thought is that others may also wish to teach Patent Law in the same way, and that is why I make this set of edited cases available.

Finally, a note on my approach to editing cases: I indicate my omissions from text with an ellipsis, and omissions present in the original with asterisks. I do not, however, indicate deletions or abridgments of citations or footnotes. Where I retain footnotes, I have tried to preserve the numbering they bear in the official case reports, but I cannot guarantee complete success on that score. In any event, one should always refer back to the official report of a case for the authoritative version.

If you decide to use this case collection to teach a course of your own — as I hope people will — please check back to ensure that you have the most up-to-date version. This version, which is 2.0, was posted in June 2015.