Administrative changes to PTO and the Copyright Office, or extending sunset provisions, don’t strengthen protection of IP rights
Mandel ’18 [Gregory N.; January; Dean & Peter J. Liacouras Professor of Law, Temple University; Minnesota Law Review, “Institutional Fracture in Intellectual Property Law: The Supreme Court Versus Congress,” 102:803]
Utilizing the same methodology described above,94 three coders classified each legislative action as strengthening intellectual property rights, weakening intellectual property rights, or being neutral with respect to such rights. Initial agreement exceeded 90%, and all discrepancies were resolved by discussion and research concerning the legislation in question.95 Though certain of the statutes included multiple provisions, each was considered as a unitary whole for analysis because each statute is passed as a single legislative act.96
At first glance, forty-three legislative acts may sound like a surprisingly high level of activity, but many of these acts were administrative or procedural in nature, with a neutral effect on intellectual property rights. Examples include laws concerning internal organization at the PTO and the Copyright Office,97 statutes that transferred authority to appoint administrative patent and trademark judges,98 and laws that extended sunset provisions.99 Removing these laws from the dataset leaves twenty congressional acts of legislation over the past fourteen years that substantively impacted intellectual property owners’ rights.