Monday, July 16, 2007

House to Vote on NIH Policy

Tomorrow, Tuesday, July 17, 2007, the House of Representatives is set to vote on an important appropriations bill that contains a provision that would require NIH to make publicly accessible on the Internet the authors' manuscript of peer reviewed journal articles researched and written with NIH support.

Peter Suber provides the details for taking action at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_07_08_fosblogarchive.html#6618575816753534506.

I cannot emphasize enough how modest a measure this is. NIH already has a copyright license from the authors of these articles to post them in PubMed Central database. All that this legislation would do is direct NIH to put its license to use.

Open Access Law - Pennsylvania

As Peter Suber reports, the Pennsylvania legislature is considering joining the movement for open access law. The House of Delegates unanimously approved a bill, introduced by Rep. Lisa Bennington, (D-Allegheny) As this editorial in the Altoona Mirror says: "Your tax dollars paid to create and enforce the laws. You should not have to pay again to view the statutes at your leisure. It’s time for Pennsylvania to catch up to the rest of the nation."

Patent Injunctions after eBay

I've recently posted a new piece: "Patent Injunctions and the Problem of Uniformity Cost."

Here's the abstract:

In eBay v. MercExchange, the Supreme Court correctly rejected a one-size-fits-all approach to patent injunctions. However, the Court's opinion does not fully recognize that the problem of uniformity in patent law is more general and that this problem cannot be solved through case-by-case analysis. This Essay provides a field guide for implementing eBay using functional analysis and insights from a uniformity-cost framework developed more fully in prior work. While there can be no general rule governing equitable relief in patent cases, the traditional four factor analysis for injunctive relief should lead the cases to cluster around certain patterns that often will have an industry-specific cast. This Essay identifies these patterns and summarizes the guideposts that courts and litigants should look for when conducting the traditional analysis in patent cases.

The Article is available on the Web from three places:

http://www.mttlr.org/volthirteen/carroll.pdf
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=992275
http://works.bepress.com/michael_carroll/