IP Owners Research Articles

Case Report: IP Ownership and University-Student Benefit Sharing

Case Report: IP Ownership and University-Student Benefit Sharing

Transfer Pricing in the Automotive Supplier Industry

Automotive suppliers are characterized by a centralized IP ownership, centralized provision of services, and a global presence of local plants that sell and invoice manufactured components directly to their customers’ local production facilities. All this makes cross-border intercompany transactions and the respective transfer pricing of automotive suppliers with respect to intangibles, manufacturing and services very challenging.

Luxury Fashion and Transfer Pricing: IP Owners, Distributors, Supply Chain and Digitalization at the Beginning of a New Era

High profitability, worldwide physical presence and strong leverage on intangibles make the luxury fashion businesses ideal targets for transfer pricing scrutiny. The industry dynamics are rapidly transforming, with digital revolution and younger customer base being the main factors. New transfer pricing issues are already adding to the existing ones: progressive lack of comparables due to expansion along the supply chain, double taxation remedies still costly and slow, increasing interest in APAs as the only viable solution to secure transfer pricing risk.

Who owns us in perpetuity?: A question of intellectual property, copyright, and information policy

In January of 2021, Aaron Ansuini, a student at Concordia University (Canada) posted the following tweet:
 “HI EXCUSE ME, I just found out the prof for this online course I’m taking *died in 2019* and he’s technically still giving classes since he’s *literally my prof for this course* and I’m learning from lectures recorded before his passing
 ..........it’s a great class but WHAT”
 The instructor, François-Marc Gagnon passed away in 2019. Tamara Kneese, writing for Slate, homed in on the key issues at stake: “This case may be particularly egregious, but it intersects with larger questions about copyright and control over faculty members’ online course materials and the various ways faculty labor within higher education is degraded and devalued,” all of which have become sharper and more important given the en masse move to online education during COVID-19.
 There are norms, ethics, and policies at stake concerning the creation, use, and distribution of online course designs and learning objects. A central issue is that online courses are often embedded in institutionally managed learning management systems, such as Canvas and Blackboard, and other educational technologies. All of the digital artifacts, then, are able to be duplicated, remixed, shared and reused - with or without the original instructor’s knowledge or express permission. The result is that online instructors are more susceptible to having their intellectual labor and property exploited by their institutions to serve administrative and financial interests.
 The American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) Statement on Online and Distance Education states that:
 The institution should establish policies and procedures to protect its educational objectives and the interests of both those who cre­ate new material and those who adapt material from traditional courses for use in dis­tance education. The administration should publish these policies and procedures and distribute them, along with requisite information about copyright law, to all concerned persons [….] Provision should also be made for the original teacher­[/]creator, the teacher­[/]adapter, or an appropriate faculty body to exercise control over the future use and distribution of record­ed instructional material and to determine whether the material should be revised or with­drawn from use.
 Sponsored by the Information Policy special interest group (SIG), this panel will be composed of three speakers that will deliver presentations that address the intersection of policy and ethics regarding online instructors’ intellectual property, with special emphasis on AAUP’s point that online instructors should be able to control their use of their course designs and artifacts. Kip Currier will provide an overview of works made for hire practices and trends in academe, as well as suggest some strategies and best practices for equipping faculty to better understand the works made for hire suite of boiler plate requirements and restrictions, as well as opportunities for leveling the IP ownership field. Suliman Hawamdeh will speak about the need to update guidelines to protect the interests of the organization. And, Emily Knox will weigh in as the former interim Associate Dean of Academic Affairs regarding institutional issues relevant to these policies.

Effect of antitrust on innovative development with a different degree of intellectual property protection

Intellectual property is often referred to as a “legal monopoly”, which should stimulate the innovative activity of authors and inventors. In this formulation, increased antitrust regulation should always have a negative effect on the innovation industry, since it is aimed at reducing the companies’ profits, and therefore, other things being equal, reducing the innovation incentives. The paper reveals the conditions under which this statement can be true, and under which, on the contrary, the strengthening of antimonopoly regulation leads to an increase in innovative output. Using cross-country data, an empirical assessment of the mutual influence of the effectiveness of antimonopoly regulation and the degree of protection of intellectual property rights on the efficiency of the innovation sector and the economy are obtained. As an indicator of relative efficiency the paper considers the proximity to the production possibilities frontier, determined by the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) method. As a result, the hypothesis for the complementary nature of the influence of both policies is confirmed: the strengthening of one gives a positive result only when the other is strong. The complementary nature of policies can be related to the following aspects. In the context of weak IP right protection, right holders are extensively using alternative mechanisms for the specification of property rights, which includes business practices that are controversial from the antitrust point of view. In such a case, strengthening the severity of antimonopoly regulation increases the costs of such practices and ultimately reduces the effectiveness of the intellectual property protection reducing output in the innovation industry. This result justifies the existence of exceptions for the IP owners, which could be present in the antimonopoly legislation in countries with a low level of IP rights protection. But as the effectiveness of the IP rights protection becomes stronger, such exceptions can be canceled. This result also shows that the notion of IP as a “legal monopoly” is overly simplistic and can lead to risks of Type I enforcement errors (punishing the innocent).

Private Datapods: Web 3.0 does not Automatically Mean Blockchain Decentralization

ICT and blockchain professionals must be careful not to equate Web 3.0 automatically with blockchain, or vice versa. That is an incorrect equivalence. Blockchain is certainly one possible architecture on which to base a Web 3.0 implementation. However, the essence of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s decentralized Web 3.0 concept is nothing automatically or implicitly to do with blockchain, but, rather, is focused on the important idea of Private Datapods. The author’s own Zykme / ZykPass invention is an available working hybrid App (beta test version) compliant with this Web 3.0 Private Datapod fundamental design principle, ushering-in a new era of decentralized user-controlled and user-owned social media based on secure P2P personal data communications, implemented using edge computing. This article describes the architecture and future development of this invention. This includes potential addition of a future blockchain-based ‘social media’ ZykToken, awarded to, and owned and tradeable by, each Zykme / ZykPass user, implementing the author’s novel CapChere (Customer Corporation) IP and business ownership structure. This contends to be a transformative, socially useful re-purposing of traditional industrial capitalism in which all are winners.

Forfeiting IP

Can IP rights be lost? That is, once IP rights are acquired, what—if anything—must owners do to keep those rights or risk forfeiting them. The answer varies widely across the IP landscape and has important consequences for follow‐on innovation, competition, and the public domain. This article takes the first close look at forfeiture mechanisms throughout the five major IP regimes—utility patent, trade secret, copyright, design patent, and trademark. I demonstrate how IP forfeiture mechanisms (e.g., maintenance fees, monitoring obligations, and use requirements) have weakened or narrowed over time. Building on prior scholarship, I also delineate the important functions that IP forfeiture mechanisms serve. By forcing IP owners to decide if the cost and effort of maintaining IP rights are worthwhile, forfeiture mechanisms help eliminate low‐value IP rights and enlarge the public domain, benefiting follow‐on innovators and society at large. In addition, forfeiture mechanisms serve an important notice or signaling role by forcing owners to engage in acts that inform second comers about the existence and scope of IP rights. These functions are particularly important when it comes to functional or useful subject matter (e.g., innovations that make a product work). Given forfeiture's role and its problematic narrowing across the IP landscape, I suggest the need for reform—particularly in design patent and copyright law, two areas that increasingly cover functional subject matter but lack any forfeiture mechanism.

CONCEPT OF APPRAISAL INSTITUTIONS IN ASSESSING THE VALUATION OF INTANGIBLE ASSETS ON SMALL MEDIUM ENTERPRISES INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AS OBJECT OF CREDIT GUARANTEE TO IMPROVE COMMUNITY'S CREATIVE ECONOMY

This study aims to analyze the factors that affect the effectiveness of Intangible Assets of Intellectual Property of Small and Medium Enterprises as objects of credit guarantees, and the concept of appraisal institutions in assessing the valuation of intangible assets of intellectual property of Small and Medium Enterprises as objects of credit guarantees in order to improve the creative economy of the community. The method used in this research is empirical juridical. The data used are primary data and secondary data. Data collection techniques data collection through library research and field studies (through questionnaires, focus group discussions, and interviews). The results of the study found that the five factors that affect the effectiveness of Intangible Assets intellectual property of Small and Medium Enterprises as objects of credit guarantees are legal factors, law enforcement, infrastructure, society and culture. The legal factor that affects is there is no special legal product for public appraisers of IPR Intangible assets. In the practice, IPR intangible assets have not been accepted by all banks as objects of basic guarantees but only as objects of additional guarantees. It is caused by no trust from the bank toward the value of IPR as basic guarantees, there have been no appraisal institutions, and there is not intellectual property rights market yet, that makes IPR is not commonly used by banks and SMEs as IP owners. The concept of appraisal institutions in assessing the valuation of intangible assets of intellectual property of small and medium businesses as objects of credit guarantees, in order to improve the creative economy of the community, is necessary to form an appraisal agency through the products of laws and regulations. These regulations, among others, regulate the intangible assets of IPR, the purposes and objectives of the IPR assessment, the requirements to become an IPR appraiser, the function and authority of IPR assessment, the valuation method used, and so on.

A critical evaluation of the effectiveness and legitimacy of webblocking injunctions

ABSTRACTRelative to the dual criteria of effectiveness and legitimacy, this article evaluates webblocking injunctions in the context of intellectual property law and with a particular focus on the vanguard role played by the English Courts. With regard to the first criterion, it is argued that there is reason to think that webblocking injunctions are viewed by IP owners as well as by legislators and courts as a relatively effective instrument in the protection of IP assets. Moreover, the extension of webblocking orders to trade marks together with their adoption in a number of legal systems, is further evidence that these orders, if not a silver bullet, at least have some utility. With regard to the second criterion, it is argued that the legitimacy of these orders is underwritten by both domestic and European legislation together with a jurisprudence that insists on the balancing of rights and a proportionate use of the orders.

Modern Intellectual Property Governance and Openness in Europe: A Long and Winding Road?

In the last decade a trend towards more ‘openness’ in terms of collaborations and access to knowledge has been observed in many different sectors and contexts. Along the spectrum of openness one can find many different varieties, such as open innovation, co-creation, open science (combined with open access and open data) and open source. Even traditionally rather ‘closed’ actors, such as publishing houses and the pharmaceutical industry, are gradually catching up and are trying to develop mechanisms to cope with this trend towards openness. Both public and private actors encounter challenges in combining this trend towards openness with the management of intellectual property rights (IPRs). Although a strong willingness may exist to collaborate, open up and share knowledge and data, IPRs often create boundaries and limitations towards cutting-edge collaborations and initiatives for openness and sharing. Over time, companies, universities, public research organisations, etc. have developed certain models to allow for openness while safeguarding ways to protect their IPRs. Yet the legal framework is often lagging behind and does not appear to reflect the socio-economic trend towards openness; in many jurisdictions, changes to IP legislation have rather focused on strengthening of the rights of IP owners. But this is not necessarily a problem as stakeholders tend to find workarounds in their day-to-day practice. This special issue aims to further the discussion about modern governance of IPRs in Europe and to explore different perspectives on how openness could be operationalised within the context of IP protection.

An Emerging Trend - ADR Mechanism in IPR Conflicts

India is country habitants having many religion and cultures, since centuries habitants of India has evolved with several forms of dispute resolution mechanisms and over period of time, they have customized, varied according to needs. Even though Britisher’s rulers had left Indian shores almost half a century ago, still several of these laws exist till date without any major changes. Wide Internet usage has rendered boundaries of the states meaningless. The people across the globe have realized its potentiality as an effective tool for communication, dissemination of information and e-commerce and enjoying to unrestricted access to multifarious interactions, transactions inevitably thereby raising many new issues in the nature of e-disputes to virtual sale/purchase of products through e-auctions or otherwise, domain disputes, trademark infringement, patents, software infringement, copyright, defamatory writings, fraud, privacy, etc. In this scenario the Intellectual Property Rights are becoming fundamentally exigent to get in to research collaborations and thereby making Intellectual property rights tool as valuable business assets for technological entities. The people across world over frequently involve in cross-border transactions having different backgrounds and different national laws or within different states of India. Some time disputable transactions create multi-jurisdictional disputes between the nationalities of different countries having different social backgrounds, mindsets. Usually those business entities having familiarity with alternative dispute resolution (ADR) are able to resolve such conflicts efficiently. As the determination of commercial or non commercial disputes before different national courts can result in to high legal and other costs as well as conflicting awards. Therefore, the ADR has a potential to provide business entities belonging to distinct nationalities a single unified forum of arbitration thereby having a final and enforceable award binding across multiple jurisdictions. Hence, increasingly, IP owners and users are approaching to many of known alternative dispute resolution (ADR) procedures like arbitration and mediation to resolve their IP disputes. In this scenario the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has been playing pivotal role since i ts inception in strengthening ADR procedures for IP conflicts and forefront in resolving IP conflicts through their specialized ADR procedures. The Intellectual Property conflicts are not that conflicts which cannot be adjudicated or resolved through ADR. As Intellectual Property conflicts being a specialised in its nature and it require specialised services of ADR experts in resolving IP conflicts, mainly due to non availability of IP experts in India is the main obstacle in resolving IP conflict through arbitration or through ADR. Thus, like any other emerging field of law, IP conflict resolution also has a plenty of debatable issues before it. In this research paper, It will be my endeavor to delve deep into these issues like amongst mainly i) Whether ADR: arbitration and mediation can be real alternative to IP disputes litigation, ii ) whether IP right disputes like any other commercial disputes can be brought under ADR procedure or not If so, to what extent?. iii) When is ADR to be preferred, when is it to be avoided; and, if ADR is preferred, what form of ADR should be pursued? iv) Whether, an alternative dispute resolution procedure can play effective role in resolving IP conflicts if so to what extent? v) Whether the parties to IP conflicts can reap overall benefits by invoking ADR procedures in comparison to traditional litigation, if so, to what extent? vi) Whether the use of a private consensual mechanism like arbitration or mediation procedures pose any threat to the resolution of such specialised disputes, if so, to what extent?

Protecting Intellectual Property through Trade and Investment Agreements: Concepts, Norm-setting, and Dispute Settlement

This paper attempts to offer a birds-eye, comparative view on two different expansionist tendencies in international IP law and policy. Looking at IP protection via IP chapters in FTAs on the one hand and by means of international investment law on the other, we can observe a common trend towards occupying additional regulatory space – albeit through different routes. The paper reviews these trends from a conceptual perspective, and by comparing norm-setting and dispute settlement in the respective areas. It finds that at a meta level, the traditional form of regulating IP in international treaties expands in form of ever-more detailed and comprehensive commitments which contracting states then have to implement (or perhaps better: import) in(to) their domestic IP laws. Since these expansions concern the traditional domain of IP laws as mechanisms that regulate private law relations, they are conceptually different from investment law as a tool primarily designed to protect against state interferences. By protecting IP rights as an investment asset, international investment law makes a whole new (or perhaps better: distinct) set of commitments from another area of global norm-setting available to IP owners. From among these commitments, the principal tool for expansion is ISDS as a litigation mechanism that directly benefits IP owners once they qualify as investors. ISDS invites IP owners to engage in creative lawyering that re-packages investment protections against state interference into tools that allow IP-owners to challenge unfavourable domestic IP rules which determine the nature and scope of the private rights IP owners rely on vis-a-vis competitors and users. Overall then, the distinct routes for regime expansion show that while FTA-based IP protection grows by means of norm-setting, investment protection for IP rights is essentially enlarged through ISDS as a private dispute settlement tool with public consequences.

Copyrights in higher education: motivating a research agenda

The Bayh–Dole Act of 1980 enabled American universities to engage in technology transfer. Thirty years of research has investigated the legislation’s effectiveness and derivative university practices, such as the establishment of technology transfer offices. Unfortunately, the technology transfer literature has focused primarily on patenting as the primary transfer vehicle for protecting intellectual property in universities, overlooking other forms of IP ownership, such as copyrights. Legal scholarship shows, however, that universities are increasingly using copyrights to protect their intellectual property and that the number of university-held copyrights exceeds patents. This paper examines the use of copyrights to protect and transfer university IP. It does so by reviewing underlying legal and policy concepts associated with copyrights and offers contemporary examples of copyright issues within universities. The paper therefore provides a foundation for future research on the role of copyrights in technology transfer.

Video Game Industry and User-Generated Content: A Dynamic Interplay Between Laws and Video Game Community Norms

In the course of the past few years, the traditional model of media production, based on the premise that content is produced by professional creators and then consumed by passive audiences, has become increasingly outdated. The development of new digital media networks and online content-sharing platforms has bridged the divide between creators and consumers, and significantly changed the way in which culture is produced, distributed and consumed. From user reviews and blogs to video ‘mashups’ and music remixes, it is clear that members of the public want to actively participate in the creation of original media content. On the other hand, many media producers feel very differently about the creative desires of their fans. Wishing to protect their intellectual and commercial interests, they frequently rely on intellectual property laws and license agreements to either completely restrict their fans’ rights to create user-generated content or, alternatively, seek to secure legal ownership of all such content. At first glance, it may seem that only one side’s interests can prevail. Focusing on the video game industry, this paper will argue that a compromise is possible. The interactions between developers and publishers of video games, and fans engaged in the creation of video game modifications show that IP owners can unlock the creative potential of their fans without having to surrender control over their IP or fan-made works. In fact, by departing from their standard deterrence-based strategies for IP protection, acknowledging the existence of community norms, and actively engaging in an open dialogue with their fans, IP owners can not only secure greater compliance with, and even increase the normative support for, their rules and policies but, potentially, also discover a more effective solution to the problem of piracy and online IP infringement.

UK university policy approaches towards the copyright ownership of scholarly works and the future of open access

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider how the open access policy environment has developed since the Rights Metadata for Open Archiving Project’s call in 2003 for universities and academics to assert joint copyright ownership of scholarly works and investigate whether UK universities are moving towards a joint copyright ownership.Design/methodology/approachThe paper analyses 81 UK university copyright policies to understand what proportion make a claim over: IP ownership of all outputs; the copyright in scholarly works; re-using scholarly works in specific ways; and approaches to moral rights. Results are cross-tabulated by policy age and mission group.FindingsUniversities have not asserted their interest in scholarly works through joint ownership, leaving research funders and publishers to set open access policy. The paper finds an increased proportion of universities assert a generic claim to all IP (87 per cent) relative to earlier studies. In total, 74 per cent of policies relinquished rights in scholarly works in favour of academic staff; 20 per cent of policies share ownership of scholarly works through licensing; 28 per cent of policies assert the right to re-use scholarly works in some way; and 32 per cent of policies seek to protect moral rights. Policies that “share” ownership of scholarly works are more recent. The UK Scholarly Communication Licence (UK-SCL) should have an impact on this area. The reliance on individual academics to enforce a copyright policy or not to opt-out of the UK-SCL could be problematic. The paper concludes that open access may still be best served by joint ownership of scholarly works.Originality/valueThis the first large-scale analysis of UK university policy positions towards scholarly works. The paper discovers for the first time a move towards “shared” ownership of scholarly works in copyright policies.

Patent Enforcement in an Uncertain World: Widespread Infringement and the Paradox of Value for Patented Technologies

In order to begin developing a base of paying licensees in the context of widespread infringement, IP owners must sometimes significantly discount licensing terms in their early negotiations – with a view that successful licenses, even at a relatively low price, will deliver value by buttressing the credibility of the IP, provide a source of cash to fund subsequent enforcement actions, and (perhaps) clarify the boundaries of the IP rights. Fuzzy IP rights and contracting difficulties pose interesting licensing and damages issues in the context of widespread infringement.

More Property Rules than Property: Revisiting the Right to Exclude in IP

Patent and copyright rely heavily on property rules rather than liability rules: in the event of infringement, courts impose injunctive relief or punitive damages rather than compensatory damages. While this scheme is intended to protect creators’ ex ante incentives to engage in intellectual production, the regime raises many problems for the creation and distribution of new works. In particular, it imposes unjustified costs on unwitting infringers and exacerbates the difficulty of coordinating among multiple parties to pursue projects that implicate several IP rights. Both problems could be ameliorated by strategic deployment of liability rules. The law of tangible property demonstrates how this strategy might work. While we often assume that the law protects tangible property with property rules, closer scrutiny shows that courts and lawmakers use liability rules to deal with unintentional trespasses and to circumvent holdout strategies that implicate real property. This analysis yields three payoffs. First, it develops the novel and counterintuitive argument that IP uses property rules in many circumstances where property law uses liability rules. This arrangement is backwards because the greater notice failures, inexhaustibility, and need for cumulative production inherent to our IP regimes relative to tangible property counsel in favor of liability rules. Second, it grounds the debate over the use of property rules versus liability rules in IP in tangible property doctrine, where courts and lawmakers have taken the pragmatic approach of structuring entitlements to facilitate economic progress. Finally, it identifies three ways the choice of remedies could serve as a concrete policy lever to address issues in IP: (1) We can correct notice failures by creating a “reasonable search defense” — eliminating property rule protection in cases of accidental infringement — to encourage users to search and owners to publicize their claims; (2) we can defuse holdout strategies by rejecting property rule protection for IP owners who refuse to bargain in good faith; and (3) the state can actively cut through patent thickets and similar anti-commons by utilizing — or threatening to use — its march-in rights and authority to enact compulsory licenses.

FORTIS

With the advent of globalization in the semiconductor industry, it is necessary to prevent unauthorized usage of third-party IPs (3PIPs), cloning and unwanted modification of 3PIPs, and unauthorized production of ICs. Due to the increasing complexity of ICs, system-on-chip (SoC) designers use various 3PIPs in their design to reduce time-to-market and development costs, which creates a trust issue between the SoC designer and the IP owners. In addition, as the ICs are fabricated around the globe, the SoC designers give fabrication contracts to offshore foundries to manufacture ICs and have little control over the fabrication process, including the total number of chips fabricated. Similarly, the 3PIP owners lack control over the number of fabricated chips and/or the usage of their IPs in an SoC. Existing research only partially addresses the problems of IP piracy and IC overproduction, and to the best of our knowledge, there is no work that considers IP overuse. In this article, we present a comprehensive solution for preventing IP piracy and IC overproduction by assuring forward trust between all entities involved in the SoC design and fabrication process. We propose a novel design flow to prevent IC overproduction and IP overuse. We use an existing logic encryption technique to obfuscate the netlist of an SoC or a 3PIP and propose a modification to enable manufacturing tests before the activation of chips which is absolutely necessary to prevent overproduction. We have used asymmetric and symmetric key encryption, in a fashion similar to Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), to transfer keys from the SoC designer or 3PIP owners to the chips. In addition, we also propose to attach an IP digest (a cryptographic hash of the entire IP) to the header of an IP to prevent modification of the IP by the SoC designers. We have shown that our approach is resistant to various attacks with the cost of minimal area overhead.

Amicus Curiae Submission in NAFTA Proceedings Eli Lilly v. Canada

This amicus brief was submitted to the NAFTA arbitral tribunal in Eli Lilly v. Canada (ICSID Case No. UNCT/14/2). The arbitration arises out of the decisions by Canadian courts to invalidate two of Eli Lilly’s pharmaceutical patents. The case involves issues of significant public interest because the tribunal’s decision is likely to impact on the legal regimes governing pharmaceutical patent protection in Canada and many other countries. Relatedly, it also bears upon international issues of access to medicines and public health. In particular, findings made in this arbitration are likely to affect, the ability and willingness of countries around the world to use the acknowledged flexibilities of the international intellectual property system, in particular under the TRIPS Agreement, for the purpose of public health and access to medicines. It will also increase the likelihood of similar investment law challenges being brought by IP owners dissatisfied by domestic courts’ decisions on the validity of their patents. This will be a new and concerning development; to date intellectual property norms have only been challenged at an international level in state-to-state proceedings.The Brief examines, amongst other issues: • the scope of Canada’s obligations under NAFTA Articles 1105 and its relationship with both domestic and international intellectual property laws; • the intersection of NAFTA’s standards of protection, in particular fair and equitable treatment (FET) with Canada’s domestic patent law;• the relationship between NAFTA Chapter 17, the TRIPs Agreement and the Patent Cooperation Treaty; • the appropriate standard of review for judicial conduct; • the importance of patent law flexibilities; and• the frequency of patent invalidations.

The Logic of International Intellectual Property Protection

As Intellectual Property becomes increasingly vital to our nation’s wealth and prosperity, the need to ensure its protection on a global basis increases correspondingly. The American economy suffers staggering losses each year to international IP theft. According to the IP Theft Commission (2013), these losses likely exceed $300 billion annually. IP theft is an injustice to the IP owners, diminishes economic prosperity, and undermines job opportunities. Indeed, this is a reason why it is so important to conclude international trade agreements, such as the recently-negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership, that contain meaningful intellectual property protections. The Constitution expressly makes protection of intellectual property rights an imperative of the federal government. The Intellectual Property Clause contained in Article I, Section 8, provides that Congress has the power “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The IP Clause is premised on the understanding that copyrights and patent rights are property rights grounded in the intellectual and physical labors of authors and inventors. There is strong constitutional foundation for international protection of Americans’ copyrights and patent rights. The IP Clause permits protection of foreign intellectual property under federal law – or at the very least, permits it as a means of securing American IP rights abroad. Federal legal recognition of foreign IP constitutes fair play. As a matter of common sense and experience, doing justice, and providing comparable treatment to rights of foreigners facilitates foreign cooperation to protect American IP rights. Treaty-making with foreign nations constitutes another critical constitutional mechanism for securing international protections for Americans’ IP rights.