Mark D. Janis

Intellectual property protection for plant innovation: Unresolved issues after J.E.M. v. Pioneer

Although the US Supreme Court upheld the patent eligibility of plants, issues remain concerning the decisions implementation and other forms of plant IP protection.

Designing an optimal intellectual property system for plants: a US Supreme Court debate

In J.E.M. Ag Supply v. Pioneer Hi-Bred, the Supreme Courts decision could radically alter the agbiotech landscape.

Obsolescence in Intellectual Property Regimes

In this article, we present a case study about the potential for new technology paradigms to drive intellectual property regimes towards obsolescence. The subject of the study, plant variety protection, is a little-understood intellectual property regime that mixes copyright and patent concepts. Using historical, legal, and technical sources, we analyze how a major conceptual shift in the plant sciences - a shift towards understanding plants as sets of molecular data - threatens to undermine the intellectual framework around which plant variety protection was structured. We analyze past and current attempts to conform plant variety protection to the new technological regime, and explain why those attempts are yielding mixed results. We then propose an alternative design for a plant variety protection regime based on unfair competition principles, and recommend that the unfair competition model be used as a vehicle for debate over the future course of plant variety protection. Our study has implications for other debates about the interaction between intellectual property rules and technological advance, in areas like copyright, patent, and some specific sui generis intellectual property regimes.

Rules v Standards for Patent Law in the Plant Sciences

This article argues that US patent jurisprudence as applied to the plant sciences is moving to a second stage that will be characterised more by incremental calibration than by spectacular change. The article discusses two doctrines of patent scope that are likely to be implicated in calibrating the utility patent system for the plant sciences: enablement and experimental use. It considers how those doctrines may be refined to serve as calibration tools in the application of patent law to the plant sciences.