Mark Lemley

Pam Samuelson has a nice write-up in Jotwell: ip.jotwell.com/reviewing-fo...

I thought that's what headlines were for

My empirical study with Paul Gugliuzza of the last four decades of Supreme Court patent cases is now published in the Boston University Law Review. Some surprises, including the fact that the Federal Circuit does better than people think

www.bu.edu/bulawreview/...

It seems people are just now discovering what i have been saying for some time: that maybe a search engine is not the highest and best use of a technology that is designed to make things up

I'm very happy to see the government moving to break up LiveNation at last. Approving the Ticketmaster merger in 2010 was a travesty at the time. This case is a good lesson both in the evils of monopoly and in the worthlessness of conduct-based remedies as a substitute for banning mergers.

A huge win today in the case I argued in February en banc at the Federal Circuit! All judges agreed with us in reversing the panel opinion, and nine judges agreed to overrule Rosen/Durling and adopt an obviousness framework consistent with Supreme Court precedent
cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-ord...

Google News offered me these two stories back to back:

"Would You Trust a Robot to Look After Your Cat?"

"China Shows Off Robot Dogs Armed With Machine Guns"

Great news: wage increases have outpaced inflation over the past five years. The result is that “for all income groups…the portion of household income required to purchase the same bundle of goods and services declined” from 2 to 6.3%.
www.cbo.gov/publication/...

An Update About How Inflation Has Affected Households at Different Income Levels Since 2019

CBO focused on households’ consumption of a bundle of typical goods and services from 2019 to compare purchasing power in 2019 with that in 2023. On average, purchasing power increased, but the effect...

www.cbo.gov

My paper "Foundation Models and Fair Use," with Stanford computer scientists, is now published in the Journal of Machine Learning Research. We discuss why AI sometimes produces output that might infringe copyright, how law deals with that, and how AI can minimize the risk jmlr.org/papers/v24/2...

A list of judges (not surprisingly Trump appointees) who have just declared themselves completely unfit for the judicial role by announcing that they will refuse to interview ANYONE from Columbia because they don't like the fact that students are protesting there

Not if they elect Trump they aren't. At least 10x more will die, likely 100x

forward.com/fast-forward...

Why top Democrats oppose bipartisan bill targeting antisemitism in universities

The GOP-led Antisemitism Awareness Act mandates the Department of Education to use contested definition of antisemitism.

forward.com

Ugh. Political theater indeed. Hopefully it goes nowhere in the Senate

I hadn't heard about the bill; can you send a link? Biden supported the right to protest, just not the taking over of buildings amp.theguardian.com/us-news/arti...

They've already told us -- just deport everyone and build condos. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024...

Jared Kushner says Gaza’s ‘waterfront property could be very valuable’

Donald Trump’s son-in-law also says Israel should bulldoze an area of the Negev desert and move Palestinians there

www.theguardian.com

It is simply false that Biden has supported the violent suppression of campus protests. I think it's entirely reasonable to disagree with him on Gaza and push to stop the war. And it is entirely reasonable to condemn those who did overreact to protests. But that's not Biden

I really hope you don't have to find out just how wrong you are about that. Because when you do there will be no coming back for any of us

I agree. And he absolutely has been. Unfortunately I think Netanyahu correctly realizes that he's out of office once the war is over, so he wants to keep it going as long as possible.

Reminder that Trump plans a dictatorship. Please do everything in your power to stop him, no matter what you think of Joe Biden

“Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles?” No, Trump said. “‘I think a lot of people like it.”

Undoubtedly protected under the current Supreme Court's anachronistic reading of the Second Amendment

www.businessinsider.com/thermonator-...

You can buy a flame-throwing robot dog for under $10,000

Ohio-based company Throwflame is selling the device, which can shoot out fire up to around nine meters away.

www.businessinsider.com

The Court had an opportunity to restore its credibility by demonstrating, as it did fifty years ago in US v Nixon, that it stood unanimously behind the rule of law regardless of party loyalty. Instead, it seems poised to demonstrate the opposite: that it is dominated by political hacks.

It is evident from today's Supreme Court argument that several Justices have abandoned any interest in the rule of law even in the face of the Trump-led insurrection. Alito's suggestion that prosecuting Trump's crimes is what poses the biggest threat to the country is particularly horrifying.

I am very excited the FTC has voted to ban noncompetes nationwide. This is a major step towards opening up labor markets and improving the lives of tens of millions of workers.

I played a small role in pushing for this, though others, like Orly Lobel, did much more

thehill.com/business/461...

Musk wants the Tesla board to give him an additional $56 billion in stock even as the company is tanking.

I think they should pay him in cybertrucks

My paper with Ishan Kumar, Anoop Manjunath, and Nathan Kahrobai showing that a large percentage of biotech companies have illegal interlocking boards is now published in the Journal of Law and Biosciences

academic.oup.com/jlb/article/...

Illegal interlocks among life science company boards of directors

Abstract. Competition between life science companies is critical to ensure innovative therapies are efficiently developed. Anticompetitive behavior may har

academic.oup.com

My paper summarizing the year in review is here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Google definitely subscribes to the "what good is a doomsday device if you don't let anyone know you have it" theory.
The proposed link tax is really dumb. But preemptively blocking California news sources before the bill passes seems like it could backfire www.journaloffreespeechlaw.org/lemley.pdf

I'm giving the patent year in review talk at noon today. Organized by OCIPLA, but it's on zoom, so others are free to join

www.ocipla.org/event/ocipla...

I would like to go back to the world where an explicit, literal statement that by someone that they will come to your house and murder you isn't just passed off as "things people say these days."

The always-great Adam Neely on Chechnya's decision to ban music with the wrong tempo -- including Chechnya's own national anthem (oops!)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q811...

Chechnya's Bizzare Ban on Musical Tempo

Chechnya's Cultural Minister just banned all music outside of 80-116BPM...why? well....This is probably just a clever way to make sure that Lezginka is legal...

www.youtube.com

In which I do not mince words about Elon Musk:
sf.gazetteer.co

Paper is here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

My law review article with Matt Wansley on Coopting Disruption is going viral on TikTok

As law review articles do . . .

www.tiktok.com/@morningbrew...

Judges in the Northern District of Texas refuse to follow the Judicial Council policy against allowing plaintiffs to pick their individual judge, making it clear they are interested only in politics, not the rule of law

www.reuters.com/legal/texas-...

Texas federal court will not adopt policy against 'judge shopping'

A federal court in Texas that has become a favored destination for conservatives suing to block President Joe Biden's agenda has decided not to follow a policy adopted by the judiciary's top policymaking body that aims to curtail the practice of "judge shopping."

www.reuters.com

I'm giving a talk at St. Louis University tomorrow called "Free the Market: How We Can Save Capitalism from the Capitalists"

docs.google.com/forms/u/0/d/...

Health Law Distinguished Speaker Series

Thursday, April 4, 2024 /// 12:00pm-12:50pm CT /// Scott Hall, Room 1122 & Zoom

Please join the Center for Health Law Studies for Stanford University Law School Professor Mark Lemley, William ...

docs.google.com

The paper is here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Great story in Business Insider about my new paper with Matt Wansley on Coopting Disruption

www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-sab...

Silicon Valley used to reward innovation. Now it strives to sabotage it.

How Big Tech undermines rival startups — from the inside

www.businessinsider.com

Yes

I think they are not using the term in it's true sense, but just to capture identical copying of products

Notably, those design/anticounterfeiting claims, which often name hundreds of defendants in a lawsuit, seem to run afoul of the joinder rules in 35 USC 299 2/2

Patent litigation in 2023 -- a modest increase in operating company suits, a notable decrease in troll suits, and a giant jump in design patent and counterfeiting suits (all measured by number of defendants). 1/2

www.rpxcorp.com/data-byte/li...

Yes

I received an email from an NGO that says "For data privacy reasons, calendar invitations cannot be sent to individual email addresses."

Surely this is just a ridiculous misinterpretation of privacy law, and not an actual rule anywhere, right?

If I thought people's minds could be changed, I would be all for it. But if it's 2024 and you still think Trump is acceptable you are in a death cult, and reasoned argument isn't going to do anything.

As long as the ban is amended to include Fox News, you may have an argument

Donald Trump on immigrants: "“I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases,” he said. “They’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals.”

You can support Trump, or you can be a decent human being. You cannot do both.
www.nytimes.com/2024/03/16/u...

The Oxford business law blog blurbed my new paper with Matt Wansley on Coopting Disruption

blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/oblb/blog-po...

A summary of the Concurrences tech antitrust conference we hosted in Palo Alto in January. You can find a summary of my (bomb-throwing) talk on the last page.

drive.google.com/file/d/1T1rp...