This Recent Development discusses the future of secondary liability for e-commerce platforms whose users sell counterfeit goods in the wake of the ongoing Gucci v. Alibaba litigation. Should the plaintiffs prevail, e-commerce platforms will be held accountable to cooperate with brand owners by removing infringing listings in a timely fashion and sanctioning users who sell counterfeits in an effective manner, resulting …
This article offers a comprehensive assessment of the tension between First Amendment law and the European Court of Justice’s decision in 2014 granting individuals the right to have search engines “forget” certain personal information about them. While the ECJ decision is vague on the boundaries of a “right to forget,” it correctly locates a problem …
Every administration in recent history has attempted to reduce regulatory redundancies. One area of regulatory redundancy that deserves attention is the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) and Department of Transportation’s (DOT) consumer protection authority over online travel agents (OTAs), which generated $111 billion in revenue in 2013. This regulatory redundancy guarantees that two agencies will oversee …
The advent of virtual schools has created uncertainty for school officials seeking to discipline students for speech. This uncertainty is fueled partly by the ostensibly omnipresent nature of virtual speech and partly by the fact that the United States Supreme Court has never ruled on the free speech rights of students in virtual schools. This …
The proliferation of small unmanned aircraft systems (microdrones) invites reconsideration of the limits of exclusive federal authority over aviation, which currently preempts state law. Public reaction to the drone phenomenon is generally adverse, putting pressure on state and local legislators to regulate drones. Many of them have enacted or are considering legislation and ordinances to …
Domain name registrars are increasingly targeted by trademark owners for registering and hosting infringing domain names, despite the lack of clear statutory authorization for these claims. Registrars, pressed by reduced profit margins, have begun offering value-added services such as sponsored domain parking and WHOIS-masking. However, such services incentivize and aid domain name purchasers to engage …
Recent scholarship on regulating 3D printing implicitly presumes the same regulation should apply to printing from both non-biological materials and biological materials. However, this presumption is mistakenly grounded. Technically, bioprinting is a subcategory of 3D printing. However, printing from biological materials presents different public policy considerations than printing from non-biological materials. When experimenting with mammalian …
While Alice v. CLS Bank has confirmed that patent claims require a further “inventive concept” beyond an underlying abstract idea or law of nature for patent-eligibility, there is little agreement on what defines either an “abstract idea” or an “inventive concept.” Resolving this uncertainty is critical to determining the patent-eligibility of software claims beyond the …
The Alice Court’s characterization of computer programming has effectively repudiated, inter alia, the doctrine that programming a general-purpose computer creates a patent-eligible “new machine.” This Article revisits In re Bernhart, the first holding based on the “new machine” principle, concluding that the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals committed a category mistake in conducting its …
Within the past several years, a new business model has rapidly expanded into a billion dollar industry, with potential to expand further—the sharing economy. The North Carolina General Assembly has yet to address how it intends to regulate the sharing economy. The General Assembly could choose to create completely new regulations for the sharing economy, …