Reviewing the Nonobviousness standard in Patents at Lewis and Clark School of Law

FFIP is taking a road Trip to attend Lewis and Clark's 2007 Fall Forum. This year's forum is on the nonobviousness requirement. This requirement is unique to patent law. It is the legal principle that reserves patent protection to technologically significant inventions; technologically trivial inventions, even if useful and new, are not patentable.

The recent Supreme Court decision in KSR v. Teleflex, raised the bar for nonobviousness.
The full text of the KSR v. Teleflex case can be found at ALTLAW.org : http://www.altlaw.org/v1/cases/183370

Speakers this year include:
Gregory Mandel Temple Law
John Duffy George Washington University Law
Rebecca Eisenberg University of Michigan Law
Rochelle Dreyfuss NYU Law
Suzanne Scotchmer University of California, Berkeley

Aside: Suzanne wrote an interesting paper on DRM and Antitrust it can be found here. http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~scotch/w11532.pdf The Antitrust conclusions are interesting although I do not think the motives for hacking are understood enough to make some of the formulas work in the practical world. Hacking is not a cost benefit analysis equation where cost saved by pirating is balanced with cost of time spent hacking. The motives for hacking are often fun, learning, prestige or even ethics.)

Scott Stern Kellogg Graduate School of Management
Vincenzo Denicolo University of Bologna (Italy)
Michael Katz UC Berkeley
Kevin Rivette Chairman of the USPTO Public Patent Advisory Committee.
Keith Sawyer University of St. Louis
Colleen Seifert University of Michigan
Steven Smith University of Wisconsin
Janet Davidson Lewis & Clark
Mark Blaxill, Senior Partner & Managing Director, Boston Consulting Group
Ian Harvey, Chairman, Intellectual Property Institute (UK)
Damon Matteo, Vice President for Intellectual Capital Management, Xerox PARC
Andy Culbert, Associate General Counsel, Microsoft
Katherine Strandberg DePaul
R. Polk Wagner Penn Law
Robert Merges UC Berkeley
Lisa LeSage Lewis & Clark
Joe Miller Lewis & Clark