We are pleased to announce the following events: 

• The recognition in May 2008 of Project Primary Investigator and Hoover Research Fellow F. Scott Kieff as one of the Nation's "Top 50 under 45" by the magazine IP Law & Business. [View magazine reprint]
   
• The appointment in December 2007 of Project Primary Investigator and Hoover Research Fellow F. Scott Kieff by United States Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez to serve for a three year term on the nine-person Patent Public Advisory Committee of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The Committee was created by Congress in 1999 to advise the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office on matters relating to the policies, goals, performance, budget, and user fees of the patent operation.  
   
• The filing on December 10, 2007, by researchers in the Hoover Project on Commercializing Innovation of an amicus brief in the Supreme Court of the United States in the patent infringement case, Quanta Computer Inc. v. LG Electronics Inc., arguing that under contract law the patent holder had a right to sue a downstream purchaser. [View brief] 

       Project Primary Investigator and Hoover Research Fellow F. Scott Kieff, who is also a Law Professor at Washington University, co-authored the brief with Project Co-Investigator and Washington University Law Professor Troy A. Paredes and University of Pennsylvania Law Professor R. Polk Wagner, in support of the respondent, LG Electronics. Five other professors, who are also experts in the intersection of intellectual property, property rights, and contracts, including Richard A. Epstein, who is Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at Hoover, co-signed the brief. The group’s interest in the case is in “ensuring that patent law develops in a way that best promotes innovation and competition.” 
       In the case, LG Electronics and Intel settled a group of disputes over patents on microchips by giving Intel only a limited license. It made sense for Intel to buy freedom from suit because otherwise Intel might have been guilty of inducing infringement by its customers. Importantly, the license made clear that it applied only to Intel, not to Intel’s customers, and the price Intel paid reflected these modest ambitions.  Quanta, a large commercially sophisticated party, bought chips from Intel with notice of the limited license and an opportunity to negotiate a price that reflected the need to also buy a patent license from LG. When LG demanded that Quanta buy such a license, Quanta argued that the legal doctrine called “first sale” had already given one. The first sale doctrine is a rule that implies patent licenses into certain sales of patented products by patentees.The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case to determine whether the first sale doctrine can fairly be stretched to reach cases like this. 
       Kieff, Paredes, and Wagner point out that the longstanding cases of the Supreme Court and Federal Circuit have treated the first sale doctrine as merely a default rule governing sales of products by patentees. They note that the doctrine does not even apply to this case because the underlying transaction in this case between the patentee, LG, and Intel is not a sale but only a limited license. Furthermore, they explain the “first sale doctrine must not be used to directly conflict with written contract terms negotiated between commercially sophisticated parties to clearly create only a limited patent license.” They show why sound public policy requires this result: “Reversing the longstanding case law that respects such licenses would have several related deleterious effects. First, it would give an undue windfall to opportunistic third parties who would be able to assert ‘licenses’ beyond those they knowingly purchased. Second, it would frustrate the reasonable expectations of the countless commercial actors who have settled cases and struck patent license agreements in reliance on the reasonable expectation that the limited terms of their contracts would be enforced. Although a transitional issue, the large number of patents licensed and the length of patent term leave its impact both broad and long. And third, it would make settling future disputes significantly more difficult.”
       The Hoover Project on Commercializing Innovation paid for the costs of printing and filing the brief.

• The publication of the book Political Institutions and Financial Development (Stephen A. Haber, Douglass C. North, and Barry R. Weingast eds., Stanford University Press, 2007).  The essays in this volume employ the insights and techniques of political science, economics, and history to provide a fresh answer to the question of why some countries develop better financial systems than others.
   
• The publication of volume 2 in the ongoing publication, volume by volume, of the 11-volume treatise Securities Regulation (Louis Loss, Joel Seligman, and Troy Paredes, eds., Wolters Kluwer/Aspen 4th ed., 2007).   
   
• The publication of the book Principles of Patent Law (F. Scott Kieff, Pauline Newman, Herbert F. Schwartz, and Henry Smith, eds., Foundation Press, 4th ed., 2008). This treatise and casebook is designed to bring into focus both the theory and practice of patents.