John F. Duffy

Harmony and Diversity in Global Patent Law

The second half of the twentieth century saw the rise of a broad movement to harmonize patent laws across nation-states. The most recent, and most significant, manifestation of this movement is the 1994 TRIPS Agreement, which requires signatory nations to adopt uniform rules on many major issues of patent law. The TRIPS Agreement has now been implemented by well over one hundred countries, including almost all major industrial nations, and it heralds a new level of international uniformity in patent law. This Article, while acknowledging the value of some harmonization of national law , explores the possible costs of the harmonization movement. Patent law itself owes its very birth not to harmony but to diversity of national law. The fifteenth-century Venetian patent statute was an experiment in law and a departure from the classical hostility to monopoly. Throughout the history of patent law, individual nations have varied their law and practice, and the results of these experiments have strengthened and improved patent practice. Diversity and experimentation continue today. As case studies of such experimentation, this Article examines business method patents and law governing the experimental use defense to patent infringement, an area in which both commentators and nations have split as to the proper approach for the law. This Article concludes that the patent law of the twenty-first century would be enriched if national and international policymakers learn to value variety.

The Inducement Standard of Patentability

In Graham v. John Deere, the Supreme Court explained that patent law’s nonobviousness doctrine is meant to restrict the award of patents only to “those inventions which would not be disclosed or devised but for the inducement of a patent.” This Article argues that this inducement standard, largely ignored in practice, should serve as the doctrinal polestar. Such an approach would provide a solid economic foundation for the patentability standard and would align patent law with the many other fields of regulatory law that currently apply economic analysis in determining the scope and content of regulation. The Article also offers several refinements to the inducement standard and explains how the patent office and courts could implement the inducement standard in an administrable way.

Pulsed Optical Logic in GaAs Etalons

We describe several experiments which use a picosecond pump-and-probe technique to perform optical logic operations in GaAs etalons [1, 2]. An operating cycle time of less than 70 ps is demonstrated in a thin “windowless” bulk GaAs device by successive operations. Arrays of NOR gates up to 2 × 4 in size are obtained by optically contacting a multiple-quantum-well (MQW) structure between reasonably flat mirrors. We also demonstrate an “optical data diode” through which data can flow efficiently in only one direction.