Recommended Citation
Clark D. Asay, Intellectual Property Law Hybridization, 87 U. Cᴏʟᴏ. L. Rᴇᴠ. 65 (2016).
Keywords
Patent, copyright, innovation, fair use
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Traditionally, patent and copyright laws have been viewed as separate bodies of law with distinct utilitarian goals. The conventional wisdom holds that patent law aims to incentivize the production of inventive ideas, while copyright focuses on protecting the original expression of ideas, but not the underlying ideas themselves. This customary divide between patent and copyright laws finds some support in the Constitution’s Intellectual Property Clause, and Congress, courts, and scholars have largely perpetuated it in enacting, interpreting, and analyzing copyright and patent laws over time.
In this Article, I argue that it is time to partially breach this traditional divide. I propose doing so by adjusting both copyright and patent law defenses and remedies so that each body of law more explicitly recognizes and facilitates the purposes of the other. In particular, in some cases copyright law’s fair use defense would be well served incorporating patent law principles relating to obviousness and novelty in assessing whether some technology’s use of copyrighted works is a fair use. And injunctive relief standards under patent law should expressly take into account how granting certain patent law remedies may affect copyrightable creative activities.
Several reasons justify abandoning the conventional divide between copyright and patent laws in pursuit of such intellectual property law hybridization. First, the traditional divide fails to take into account the increasingly interdependent relationship between creative and innovative efforts prevalent in today’s world; technological innovation often triggers creative efforts, and vice-versa. Thus, adjusting defenses and remedies under each body of law in order to better adapt to these realities would help facilitate them, thereby providing additional incentives to create and invent that arguably offset any weakening of incentives brought about through such hybridization. Second, the traditional divide ignores much modern neurobiological, psychological, and cultural research, which shows that the creative processes that lead to both copyrightable expression and patentable invention are often so intertwined as to make neatly dividing and encouraging them under separate bodies of law difficult. Given these interrelationships, relaxing each body of law’s remedial harshness in some cases should actually spur creative and inventive activities. And finally, some scholarship has recently suggested that, based on the historical record, the Intellectual Property Clause of the Constitution is best interpreted as assuming the interdependent nature of creative and inventive activities; updating each body of law to better reflect these interdependencies is thus also warranted as a constitutional matter. These reasons collectively suggest that calibrating each of copyright and patent law to the interdependent nature of many creative and inventive activities better aligns each body of law with their common utilitarian theoretical heritage. The Article concludes by suggesting that hybridization efforts may be warranted not only within the intellectual property realm, but within the law more generally.
Relation
87 U. Colo. L. Rev.
Publication Title
University of Colorado Law Review