The U.S. Trade Representative has requested comments for the 2018 Special 301 Review, in which it seeks to “identify countries that deny adequate and effective protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) or deny fair and equitable market access to U.S.…
[Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain Link (CC-BY-SA)] Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author's death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1961 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2018, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2057
[Paper by Andrea Contigiani, Iwan Barankay and David H. Hsu] Abstract: Does heightened employer-friendly trade secrecy protection help or hinder innovation? By examining U.S. state-level legal adoption of a doctrine allowing employers to curtail inventor mobility if the employee would “inevitably disclose” trade secrets, we investigate the impact of a shifting trade secrecy regime on individual-level patenting outcomes...