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Consumers\u27 Declining Power in the Fintech Auto Loan Market
Get PDFAutomobiles have become part of America’s infrastructure. For most people, having access to a car is crucial to their livelihoods and they will take on significant amounts of debt to purchase vehicles. Auto debt is unlike any other consumer debt, both in its structure, which allows creditors to easily seize collateral, and in its lack of regulation. The unique and lucrative nature of auto debt has not gone unnoticed by lenders or by companies leveraging fintech to offer people new ways to purchase cars and car loans. This Article assesses the evolving marketplace for auto sales, leasing, and loans to evaluate how Americans access cars, including consumer bankruptcy’s place in helping people keep their cars. Based on this assessment, it argues that power imbalances between auto lenders and consumers have widened and likely will continue to widen, to people’s detriment. The Article ends by outlining and evaluating a series of ideas to facilitate needed “car security” for Americans
The Replicability Crisis in Patent Law
Get PDFThere is a “replicability crisis” in the scientific literature. Scientists attempting to redo experiments in reputable, peer-reviewed journals have found that staggering numbers of these experiments—up to 90%—do not work. Patents, like scientific articles, contain experiments. These experiments often form the backbone of the patent and provide crucial support for patentability. Patent examiners use these experiments to evaluate whether the invention works, and thus whether the patent should be granted. The replicability crisis in the scientific literature is therefore of utmost importance to the patent system. Transferring the insights of the replicability crisis to patents begs the question of whether experiments in patents are similarly irreplicable—a question that has not previously been asked in the literature.
This Article’s novel empirical study of 500 patents and applications measures the replicability of experiments in patents. Using methodological quality of the experiment as a proxy for replicability, this study finds that experiments in patents have very poor methodological quality, which means that they are likely irreplicable at rates at least as high as experiments in scientific journals.
Given the centrality of experiments to patents, this Article’s empirical finding is a crisis not only of replicability, but also of patent law, and has important implications for patent doctrine, theory, and policy. Patent law relies on the assumption that, when a patent is filed, it has been “reduced to practice”—meaning that the invention works. The reality is that most inventions likely do not work, casting serious doubt on this assumption. Similarly, the underlying justification for patents—incentivizing innovation—requires that they contain enough information to teach others how to make and use the invention. Irreplicable patents may not do this. In short, there is a fundamental mismatch between patent law’s theory and doctrine, which treat patents as reflecting fully formulated inventions, and what patents often represent, which is early stage, frequently unproven, results. The replicability literature—and the findings of this Article—teach us that experiments reported in patents are not reliable enough to merit the level of control and influence that they are granted in the patent system.
This Article argues that patent law cannot solve irreplicability; instead, patent theory must better reflect the reality of irreplicability. Several policy proposals flow from this reformulation, including easing the process of invalidating inoperable patents, improving disclosure of ex post data in patents, and clarifying the experimental use exception
Appraising Policy: A Taxonomy of Ex Ante Impact Assessments
Get PDFIn the pursuit of better policy, many nations have turned to Impact Assessments as a potential solution. However, in order to make Impact Assessments as effective and impactful as possible, governments must think critically about which body should write Impact Assessments and what should go into these documents. In this Paper, I survey different Impact Assessment structures and the various government bodies formed to draft or review them. After completing this survey, I conclude that presidential and parliamentary systems should form their Impact Assessment offices differently in order to complement their differing governmental structures. While presidential systems would be best served by the sponsoring agency completing Regulatory Impact Assessments and an internal legislature office completing Legislative Impact Assessments, parliamentary systems should seek to establish an independent office dedicated entirely to creating Impact Assessments
A Production View on Patent Procurement
Get PDFWhen we think of a “production environment,” a law firm patent practice is not usually the first thing that comes to mind. But why not? Patent practices are highly process-oriented, and they certainly involve “manufacturing” work product, primarily in the form of new patent applications and office action responses. This article discusses how, with a production view on patent procurement, exploiting the principles of lean production can be a compelling way to adapt to tough issues presently roiling the patent ecosystem
Artificial Creativity: A Case Against Copyright for AI-Created Visual Artwork
Get PDFArtificial intelligence is becoming increasingly complex, and provides examples of compelling, human-like performances. One such artificial intelligence technology is known as Creative Adversarial Network (“CAN”) technology, which relies on inputs of preexisting pieces of art to create pieces of original art that pass as human-made. Whether the coders responsible for CAN-technology should be granted coverage for the resultant art remains an open question in United States jurisprudence. This paper seeks to explore why, given both software’s historical legacy in copyright law and bedrock copyright justifications, extending copyright coverage to the coders responsible for CAN technology would be a grave misstep in copyright policy
The Problem of \u27Misclassification\u27 or How to Define who is an \u27Employee\u27 Under Protective Legislation in the Information Age
No full textProfessor Dau Schmidt\u27s contribution is titled, The Problem of \u27Misclassification\u27 or How to Define who is an \u27Employee\u27 Under Protective Legislation in the Information Age.https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facbooks/1216/thumbnail.jp
Boxing Pandora Rethinking Borders, States, and Secession in a Democratic World
No full textA timely and provocative challenge to the foundations of our global order: why should national borders be unchangeable?The inviolability of national borders is an unquestioned pillar of the post–World War II international order. Fixed borders are believed to encourage stability, promote pluralism, and discourage nationalism and intolerance. But do they? What if fixed borders create more problems than they solve, and what if permitting borders to change would create more stability and produce more just societies? Legal scholar Timothy Waters examines this possibility, showing how we arrived at a system of rigidly bordered states and how the real danger to peace is not the desire of people to form new states but the capacity of existing states to resist that desire, even with violence. He proposes a practical, democratically legitimate alternative: a right of secession. With crises ongoing in the United Kingdom, Spain, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and many other regions, this reassessment of the foundations of our international order is more relevant than ever.https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facbooks/1215/thumbnail.jp