In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., the Supreme Court voted by five-to-four to expand the government edicts doctrine for the first time since 1888. 140 S. Ct. 1498 (2020). The State of Georgia had claimed copyright in the annotations contained in its only official collection of law, the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA). Id. at […]
In 1718, the infamous pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, lost his flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, after running it aground in what is now Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina. In 1996, Intersal, Inc., a marine salvage company, discovered the remains of the Queen Anne’s Revenge. North Carolina, the wreck’s legal owners, contracted with Intersal […]
Recently, courts have invalidated patents for claiming “abstract” ideas or business methods under Section 101 of the patent laws as applied in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014). The Court reasoned that taking a method that is “abstract” — practiced in the prior art “manually,” without a computer – and just performing […]
Professor Hansen spoke on the topic “The Supreme Court and Intellectual Property Law- It’s Not What You Think” on January 25, 2013 at John Marshall Law School in Chicago, IL. IP Hansen_Jan25_2013
