1,765 research outputs found
Dr. Miriam McCormick – Faculty Author Interview
No full textDr. Miriam McCormick, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law, discusses her new book, Believing Against the Evidence: Agency and the Ethics of Belief published recently by Routledge. In this book, Dr. McCormick argues that the standards used to evaluate beliefs are not isolated from other evaluative domains. The ultimate criteria for assessing beliefs are the same as those for assessing action because beliefs and actions are both products of agency
Regulation of Book Markets
Get PDFOver the years, many European countries have regulated their national book markets. Chief among the regulatory schemes is the resale price maintenance (“RPM”) regime, under which booksellers must offer books for a fixed price for a limited time period. The suggested rationales for this legal regime are mainly: (1) viewing books as cultural goods that deserve special treatment; (2) advancing diversity in the book market; (3) creating a wide distribution of and accessibility to books; and (4) supporting small booksellers. This Article explores the normative rationales for the RPM regime’s adoption and design in book markets. The RPM regime has been discussed and analyzed using a positive economic framework, but its application in reality has been missing a normative theoretical basis. This Article demonstrates that absent such a theoretical basis, policymaking is meaningless. Policymakers as well as courts cannot solely rely on positive economic analysis. Normative analysis is inevitable. This Article explores the missing normative analysis of RPM regimes in the context of book markets. It exposes an important blind spot in regulatory policy and judicial judgment. Lastly, the normative framework introduced in this Article may prove relevant for American RPM arrangements. Since American antitrust scrutiny of RPM schemes recently transformed from a per se rule to a rule of reason analysis, American policymakers and courts are expected to encounter a new wave of resurfacing RPM schemes
Recalibrating Patent Protection for COVID-19 Vaccines: A Path to Affordable Access and Equitable Distribution
No full textFair Use as a Market Facilitator
Get PDFThe Digital Age has enabled individuals worldwide to store, organize, and share everything from cherished memories embodied in photographs and videos to academic writing and correspondence. Yet, archived collections of academic, public, and private libraries are out of reach to many, and many books are now beyond reach because they are no longer in print. The high cost of digitization exacerbates these challenges.
In 2004, Google Inc. responded to these issues by announcing a project to scan and digitize the collections of several leading universities and public libraries (the “Google Books” project). The project offered users the opportunity to search the entire corpus of scanned works. For works still under copyright, users could view only snippets sufficient to give them a taste of the complete work; users interested in accessing the full text could, however, buy the books from the publisher directly through links that the system provides.
Several authors and publishers filed suit in the Southern District of New York, arguing that the Google Books project infringed their copyrights in their works. The district court held that allowing users to search unauthorized digital copies of the works and see snippets from those works was noninfringing fair use. The Second Circuit affirmed. The courts reasoned that the purpose of the copying was highly transformative, the public display of text was limited, and the project did not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the original works.
This article explores the effects of these decisions, arguing that the fair use holding played a major role in facilitating the creation of markets for archiving copyrighted works. This market facilitation role is atypical of the fair use defense’s usual role and arguably fails fully to account for the effect that the use could have upon the potential market for—or value of—the copyrighted work. This article will explore the fair use defense’s unexpected market facilitation role and suggest that it should be carefully considered by courts, especially in light of the rationales underlying the fair use defense, which focus mainly on market failure and freedom of speech
Recalibrating Patent Protection for COVID-19 Vaccines: A Path to Affordable Access and Equitable Distribution
Get PDFA safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine is the holy grail of our generation, necessary to resurrect our societies, save millions of lives, and protect our economies from collapse. Patent protection is the primary legal mechanism for ensuring timely development of such a vaccine. The patent system is designed to create the necessary incentives for private parties to invest in developing the vaccine, knowing they will enjoy the fruits of their success. Indeed, patent protection is necessary to promote human knowledge generally as well as a quick, safe, and effective COVID-19 vaccine.
Yet in reality, patent law may be obstructing the very goal it is intended to achieve. Patent law grants exclusive rights to inventors, enabling them to charge supracompetitive prices, delaying the distribution and dissemination of emerging technologies. In the context of the COVID-19 vaccine, patent protection means that vaccines will be financially out of reach for many. This produces a paradoxical result: rather than promote technological advancement for the public good, patent protection impedes it. Since universal immunity is necessary in the fight against the pandemic, delays in vaccine distribution can be catastrophic, costing millions of lives and carrying devastating economic consequences.
This Article therefore proposes a novel, alternative patent regime, designed to overcome this paradox at the heart of patent law. We propose a mechanism that will eliminate the problem of overprotection of patent rights that exists under current patent law, while still providing sufficient incentive for inventors to invest in innovative efforts. Under our proposed regime, the developer of a new vaccine will be granted a patent protecting its invention, but this patent will expire once the patentee has recouped its investment, plus a handsome profit. This regime, which we term “recoupment patent,” ensures that inventors are rewarded appropriately—but not excessively—for their innovative efforts. The result is a structure that encourages innovation while minimizing the time it takes for life-saving inventions to reach the public domain. We compare the proposed regime with other suggestions for reforming the patent system, including compulsory licensing; government incentives such as grants, subsidies, and prizes; and altruistic initiatives such as private-public partnerships, patent pools, and patent pledges. We highlight the recoupment patent model’s advantages over these alternatives
Registry Systems as Gatekeepers: How Patent Registries Create Systemic Barriers to Innovation
Get PDFPicture an inventor. Anyone at all. We bet you imagined a man, is that right? If you did, that’s not surprising—our study of over 140,000 patent applications reveals that three out of four patents name all-male inventors, and only three percent of patents represent the inventions of women-only teams. But this massive gender gap is not just about who chooses to invent—it’s about who gets to protect their innovations through the patent system.
This Article presents groundbreaking evidence that women face systemic barriers in securing patents, even when they clear the hurdles to become inventors. Drawing on an unprecedented dataset spanning four major patent offices (USPTO, EPO, WIPO, and IPO), we find that patent applications from teams with female inventors are significantly less likely to be granted than those from all-male teams—even when controlling for technology field, team size, and filing location. Moreover, when women secure patents, their innovations receive fewer citations from future inventors, suggesting their contributions are routinely undervalued.
These findings challenge the conventional wisdom that gender gaps in patenting reflect the underrepresentation of women in technical fields. Instead, our data reveal how the patent system itself, through high costs, complex procedures, and human discretion in examination, creates additional barriers for women inventors. This matters because patents are more than mere pieces of paper—they’re crucial tools for attracting investment, building companies, and shaping technological progress.
Previous studies have offered glimpses of these disparities by looking at single patent offices or global averages. Our multi-jurisdictional analysis provides the first comprehensive picture of how patent systems worldwide may be stifling women’s innovations. The implications are stark: when patent systems disproportionately exclude women inventors, we all lose out on potential breakthroughs and economic growth.
To address these systemic barriers, we propose specific reforms to make patent systems more accessible and equitable. These include procedural changes to reduce examiner bias, expanded support for underrepresented inventors, and—most ambitiously—a new “unregistered patent” system that could provide baseline protection while reducing entry barriers. At stake is not just fairness in innovation, but the future of technological progress itself
[Rezension zu:] Miriam Havemann: The Subject Rising Against its Author
No full textRezension zu Miriam Havemann: The Subject Rising Against its Author. A Poetics of Rebellion in Bryan Stanley Johnson's Oeuvre. Hildesheim/Zürich/New York (Georg Olms Verlag) 2011 (= ECHO - Literaturwissenschaft im interdisziplinären Dialog, Bd. 13). 427 S.
Mit der Publikation ihrer in der Bochumer Komparatistik eingereichten Dissertation widmet sich Miriam Havemann einem bis vor wenigen Jahren fast in Vergessenheit geratenen britischen Schriftsteller der 1960er und 1970er Jahre, dessen Arbeiten erst mit dem Erscheinen von Jonathan Coes Biographie 'Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson' (2004) und der Wiederauflage vieler seiner Romane neue Beachtung fanden
Miriam Merzbacher-Blumenthal collection 1878-2009 1927-1975, 1995-2003
No full textThe collection includes memoirs, poems, notes, correspondence, photographs and clippings pertaining to Miriam Merzbacher-Blumenthal, to her husband Peter and to her mother Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss. Materials concentrate on the 1940s, when Miriam Merzbacher-Blumenthal and her mother Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss lived in Amsterdam and New York, as well as on correspondence from the 1950s and 1960s.Four extensive manuscripts of a doctoral dissertation on the poet Ilse-Blumenthal-Weiss by Beatrix Marguerre Pollack in addition to background information on the author have been removed to the LBI Manuscript Collection (The doctoral dissertation was published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich, 1994.)Books from the private library of Miriam Merzbacher-Blumenthal, pertaining to German literature and German-Jewish topics, including signed copies by Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Nelly Sachs and others, have been removed to the LBI Library.Miriam Merzbacher-Blumenthal was born on March 7, 1927, the daughter of Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss and Herbert Blumenthal. The Blumenthal-Weiss family lived in Berlin until 1937, when the parents, their daughter Miriam and her older brother Peter emigrated to Holland. Herbert, who was a dentist, and Peter Blumenthal were deported to Mauthausen and Auschwitz concentration camps and killed. Ilse and Miriam survived Westerbork and Theresienstadt concentration camps. In 1947 they immigrated to the United States.Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss started writing poetry as a child. She was a successful writer, who published several books and exchanged letters with, among others, Rainer Maria Rilke and with her friends Nelly Sachs and Hermann Hesse.Miriam Merzbacher-Blumenthal married Peter Merzbacher in the late 1940s.The couple had two children and lived in New York City until 1961 before moving to Connecticut. Peter Merzbacher was born on December 4, 1910 in Nuremberg, Germany. Most of his family lived in Nuremburg and Munich. After emigrating from Nazi-Germany in 1936, Peter lived in Brazil for 10 years before immigrating to the United States.Finding aid available online.See also the Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss collection, AR 1020.Processeddigitize
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