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France’s experience with the Directive suggests that merely granting new rights to news publishers may prove ineffective without additional interventions that go beyond copyright – in this case strict antitrust enforcement. This requires governments and their agencies to be intentional (and often aggressive) about licensing negotiations, stepping in to address news publishers’ lack of bargaining power relative to powerful platforms, and compelling platforms to negotiate in good faith. However, it remains uncertain whether all member states share the political will of the French government to supervise and direct negotiations. It is worth noting that despite the deadline for national transposition being 7 June 2021, 13 out of 27 countries had not fully transposed the Directive into national law as of 19 May 2022.26 Thus, the effectiveness of additional ancillary rights remains dubious, without additional measures in areas such as antitrust and guidance for licensing processes to supplement them.

It is becoming increasingly clear that focusing on enhancing news publishers’ copyright protections does not by itself enable them to obtain better deals from digital platforms. Digital platforms remain extremely powerful, enabling them to pursue tactics of attrition in negotiations, like withdrawing or modifying their news products to circumvent the intended outcome of the law. In the absence of additional measures, such as those in France, news publishers may be given take-it-or-leave-it deals, with the underlying threat of diminished reach and viewership as a consequence of not having their content on platforms. By themselves ancillary rights may not be successful in compelling platforms to come to the negotiating table, and they cannot guarantee a fair deal will be struck. Greater focus is needed on the nature of the negotiations themselves, to ensure they are carried out in a fair manner, free from the undue influence that platforms may enjoy by virtue of their deep pockets and scale – millions of users that publishers may depend on them to reach.

As Jessica Silbey contends, intellectual property’s narratives are really origin stories about the nation and its people, used to define and negotiate the boundaries of Americanness itself. 15 Collective myths around intellectual property citizenship reinforce and update Euro-American ideals of Romantic authorship/Romantic inventorship, 16 rendering them legible for the cultural politics of the era through evolving rhetorical constructions of hard work, innovation, ingenuity, and ruggedness. In the American imaginary, authors are creatives who produce valuable cultural works; inventors are geniuses who transform flashes of brilliance into practical inventions; trademark owners are producers of goods who protect hard-earned authenticity and quality. 17 Intellectual property citizenship is a mythical ideal defined in part through its relation to these characteristics of individuals who attain the American Dream. Further, it helps to show that intellectual property is a racialized concept, which obscures whiteness and racial power through the mobilization of national feelings of hope, optimism, and pride, as well as fear, anxiety, and protectiveness.

Silbey emphasizes the qualities of Americanness that underlie and animate intellectual property in a mutually constitutive bond. However, she does not go so far as to unpack the racial meaning of such characteristics. Embedded in understandings of Romantic creatorship are intersectionally inflected racial and colonial presuppositions about the value of white male knowledge and the value of people of color knowledge.18 Intellectual property law, as a rhetorical enterprise that shapes Americanness, also constitutes racial and colonial difference in ideological and material ways. Just as “[l] aw constructs race,”19 intellectual property law constructs race.20

What is the difference between patent inventorship and ownership? People commonly confuse patent inventorship with ownership — or assume that they are the same thing. But they are distinct concepts: The owner of a patent enjoys all of the rights and benefits granted by the patent. The inventor is not always the owner of the patent, and so doesn’t always enjoy those rights. .

People commonly confuse patent inventorship with ownership — or assume that they are the same thing. But they are distinct concepts: The owner of a patent enjoys all of the rights and benefits granted by the patent. The inventor is not always the owner of the patent, and so doesn’t always enjoy those rights. .

Of course, an AI would not own a patent. We have never suggested this, and I am not aware of anyone seriously making such an argument. AI systems lack both legal and moral rights and thus the ability to own property. Moreover, there would be significant costs and no obvious benefits to changing laws to allow AI ownership. Nevertheless, many of the objections to the Artificial Inventor Project have unfortunately focused on AI ownership. Again, listing an AI as an inventor is not a matter of providing rights to machines, but it would protect the moral rights of traditional human inventors and the integrity of the patent system. As discussed earlier, it is frequently the case that the inventor of a patent is not its owner. We also believe that an AI’s owner should own any patents on AI-generated inventions, in line with general principles of property ownership as well as rules that apply to other areas of intellectual property (IP) law such as trade secret protections.

The first problem involves differing national definitions of IP rights. Although TRIPS provides a framework for IP rights harmonization, it authorizes significant flexibility for WTO members to adopt different standards, leading to disparate legal frameworks among countries that could disadvantage the protection or obtaining of IP rights of other trading partners. This disparity in legal frameworks often attracts the attention of trading partners and the scholarly community. For example, recent US Supreme Court cases have had the effect of weakening protections for software-enabled and genetic inventions, while other major patent offices have had more consistent or even liberalizing approaches. There continues to be wide debate regarding whether the “weakening” of the US patent system has led to a decline in innovation in affected areas, or whether it has enabled companies to utilize other mechanisms to protect their innovations and thereby achieve greater freedoms to operate and implement inventions (Madigan and Mossoff, 2016).

The primary goal of a patent is to secure exclusive rights to produce and sell your invention or license others to do so. If you cannot enforce it, your patent is not very valuable. This article discusses ways you can strengthen the value and enforceability of your patent.

Four ways to create a strong, valuable patent:

Beyond documentation, Indigenous and local communities to whom traditional knowledge belongs should be the primary custodians of this knowledge: for example, if a spin-off innovation that utilizes traditional knowledge is deemed patentable or a creative work generated by communities can be copyrighted, it should be the choice of community representatives to use and benefit from the resulting IP protection (or refuse use of the traditional knowledge in particular innovations or publications). National traditional knowledge systems should include legal support for communities to make and enforce those decisions. This will help to mitigate some of the inherent power imbalances that conversations around traditional knowledge present.

There remain practical, legal, and ethical challenges to consider. The principle should be clear, however: If traditional knowledge is placed outside the public domain and into the IP system, the choice to do so should be made by the community that created it—and any benefits that accrue should flow back to that community.

III. TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE/INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

“Critical” perspectives in the context of international IP law are now emerging.105 Taking up the challenge to apply the lens of critical race and other “critical theories,”106 scholars such as Margaret Chon contend that globalization and the gap between rich and developing nations of the former colonial period in conjunction with IP have “injected human rights and social justice debate into a field dominated by commercial instrumentalism and economic rationales . . . .”107 The debate over traditional knowledge reflects tensions between the developed world and the Third World over culture and control of resources.108 Scholars such as Peter Yu explore the connection between IP and human rights.109 Angela Riley urges making distinctions between IP rights that further the interest of a mere few but dominant entities, for example the Walt Disney Corporation, “and those that are designed to put indigenous peoples on equal footing with other actors in the global market.”110

The quality of issued patents drives the entire patent system. Valid patents fuel innovation, but invalid patents often have the opposite effect. Well-searched claims with clear boundaries, detailed disclosures with understandable teachings, and alignment with the proper statutes, rules and regulations, all contribute to a high-quality patent that an inventor can rely on and that appropriately apprises competitors and the public of the scope of the invention.

Although the U.S. patent system overall is still arguably the best in the world, there is room to do things better. Instead of leading the world in issuing robust and reliable patents, we are at risk of being surpassed by China in the innovation arena. It is incontestable that many improvements to drafting and prosecuting of patent applications can be made by both the applicants and examiners to provide more certainty to the validity of issued patents. Many of these refinements could be implemented easily, and if the patent community starts now to advance the patent examination process, we could significantly improve the strength of issued patents, enabling greater reliance and security for patent owners in making investments, reducing unnecessary litigation costs, and greatly diminishing the need for post grant procedures to review patent validity.

[Gary,07/13/2023, American Public University, “What Is Intellectual Property Law? And Why Does it Matter?”, https://www.apu.apus.edu/area-of-study/security-and-global-studies/resources/what-is-intellectual-property-law/#:~:text=IP%20Laws,variety%20of%20products%20and%20services, accessed 7/11/2024, LR]

How to Trademark Something

[Gary,07/13/2023, American Public University, “What Is Intellectual Property Law? And Why Does it Matter?”, https://www.apu.apus.edu/area-of-study/security-and-global-studies/resources/what-is-intellectual-property-law/#:~:text=IP%20Laws,variety%20of%20products%20and%20services, accessed 7/11/2024, LR]

Trademarks

and/or. Banish from your working vocabulary this "much condemned conjunctive-disjunctive crutch of sloppy thinkers" (citing Raine v Drasin, discussed below) . . . .

The word or usually includes the sense of and:

C.A.2 (Conn.) 1958. Where words in will are placed in the disjunctive, and intent of testator is clear, word “or” is often construed as “and”.—Hight v. U.S., 256 F.2d 795.—Wills 466.

Ct.Cl. 1878. The word “or” in a contract will not be construed to mean “and,” where it connects propositions reasonably in the alternative. Thus, the word in a contract which binds the contractor to supply so many pounds, more or less, as may be required for the wants of certain government stations between a certain time, cannot be construed to mean “and,” and does not entitle the constractor to furnish all the oats which may be needed at the station.—Merriam v. U.S., 14 Ct.Cl. 289, affirmed 2 S.Ct. 536, 107 U.S. 437, 17 Otto 437, 27 L.Ed. 531.

OR To suggest that only one possibility can be realized, excluding one or the other: "You can study hard for this exam or you can fail." To suggest the inclusive combination of alternatives: "We can broil chicken on the grill tonight, or we can just eat leftovers. To suggest a refinement of the first clause: "Smith College is the premier all-women's college in the country, or so it seems to most Smith College alumnae." To suggest a restatement or "correction" of the first part of the sentence: "There are no rattlesnakes in this canyon, or so our guide tells us." To suggest a negative condition: "The New Hampshire state motto is the rather grim "Live free or die." To suggest a negative alternative without the use of an imperative (see use of and ): "They must approve his political style or they wouldn't keep electing him mayor."

1. One of two; the one or the other; -- properly used of two things, but sometimes of a larger number, for any one

C.A.5 (Tex.) 1988. The word “and” is to be accepted for its conjunctive connotation rather than as a word interchangeable with “or” except where strict grammatical construction would frustrate clear legislative intent.—Bruce v. First Federal Sav. And Loan Ass’n of Conroe, Inc., 837 F.2d 712—Statut 197.

C.A.Fed. 2001. Inclusion of conjunctive “and” in regulation indicated that all three of the enumerated criteria had to be demonstrated.—Watson v. Department of Navy, 262 F. 3d 1292, certiorari denied 122 S.Ct. 817, 534 U.S. 1083, 151 L.Ed.2d 700.—Admin Law 412.1.