ICLE submitted comments to the FCC on the First Amendment implications of the leased access rules. Associate Director, Legal Research Ben Sperry argued the changes in the video marketplace towards competition undercut the justification for subjecting regulation of cable operators’ speech to only intermediate scrutiny. As a result, the leased access rules should be reviewed as compelled speech under strict scrutiny. The leased access rules are not narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest and therefore would fail under the strict scrutiny standard.

Click here to read the full comments.

In the “News Roundup” of episode 269. A McLaughlin Group for Cybersecurity, Gus Hurwitz covers the Supreme Court’s ruling on when a forum is subject to First Amendment limits. The full episode is embedded below.

https://www.steptoe.com/podcasts/TheCyberlawPodcast-269.mp3

 

Summary

Chairwoman Greenstein, Vice Chairman Lagana, and members of the Law and Public Safety Committee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to testify before you.

The general thrust of my comments today is that bad incentives exist in the law enforcement practice known as Civil Asset Forfeiture (“CAF”) that lead to violations of our citizens’ civil rights. Without the support of the New Jersey legislature, it will be next to impossible to identify where and how those incentives are working to undermine our justice system. Thus, S1963, and its counterpart in the General Assembly, A3442, provide a crucial first step in the process of coming to understand how CAF is practiced in New Jersey, and where our legislature will need to look next to root out any systematic injustices being perpetrated through CAF programs.

I believe there is a problem with how civil asset forfeiture is practiced on the whole, but even for those relatively more supportive of the practice, there is a way to conceptually divide the potentially problematic aspects of CAF in order to find areas for reform.

The problems of CAF are separable into two conceptual groups: in the first group there are bad systemic incentives that are distinct from the second group of more specific problems of procedural justice in individual cases. Indeed, if bad incentives exist within a legal system, that surely constitutes a breach of procedural justice as well, but the problems associated with systemic incentives operate on a global scale and are addressable as such, whereas the procedural justice issues such as presumptions, proof standards, and civil rights guarantees are typically more cognizable within a particular case.

When we talk about the incentives that drive CAF as a general law enforcement program, we think about things like whether law enforcement can retain the proceeds of the program and what utility those programs have generally on proceedings against criminal networks. On the other hand, when we think about procedural justice concerns, like the right to representation or the standard of proof, we are focused more on how the operation of a program affects individual citizens that are brought into the system as defendants (or, more precisely, parties with claims to property that is subject to a forfeiture proceeding).

The procedural justice problems that exist in CAF programs are troubling, and deserve the careful consideration of this body. Today, however, I intend to focus my remarks on the incentive problems with CAF programs because they are more directly implicated, and would stand most to be rectified, by the pending legislation before the Senate and Assembly.

As detailed further below, there are due process protections, guaranteed by the U.S. and New Jersey Constitutions, that are owed to individuals subjected to CAF proceedings. Yet, as CAF programs operate, these protections are systematically undermined. Based on the relevant case law from the Supreme Court, the due process protections are clear: individuals entrusted with protecting the public good, like prosecutors and other law enforcement officers, have an obligation to act on behalf of the community, free from incentives to bend the power of their offices to self-serving ends.

CAF has a place in law enforcement, and can be a useful tool for disrupting criminal networks. There must be, however, systemic protections that disrupt the possibility for bad incentives to work on our public servants. First, these protections should include a requirement that seized property be sent to some neutral fund — the general fund, a fund for drug treatment or prisoner reentry, or something of similar general applicability. By allowing law enforcement personnel to retain seized property for use by their department, we allow a distorting pressure to be placed on our public servants that is flatly unconstitutional.

Second, and the subject of today’s hearing, there should be general, standardized reporting requirements applied through uniform legislation on all agencies that seize property. These reports should be publicly available, and presented in a format that helps citizens to understand what property is being taken, what sorts of people it is being taken from, how much is being taken, and what exact uses it is being put to. Without this sort of transparency, we introduce yet more distortion into the administration of justice.

There is much more to do. We need, I believe, strong civil rights protections for persons who are subject to CAF proceedings. But I also believe that starting with greater transparency requirements like those contained in the bills under consideration would go a long way toward rectifying some of the major flaws in CAF proceedings.

Behavioral economics has taken the academy by storm over the past two decades. The Obama administration has even looked to the discipline—which posits that psychological biases frequently lead consumers to make bad economic decisions—to shape government policy. But is behavioral economics relevant to interpreting the Constitution? That’s the novel claim raised by Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman, which the Supreme Court will hear Tuesday.

Read the full piece here.

About a month ago, I was asked by some friends about the shift from the first-to-invent patent system to a first-to-file patent system in the America Invents Act of 2011 (AIA). I was involved briefly in the policy debates in the spring of 2011 leading up to the enactment of the AIA, and so this query prompted me to share a short essay I wrote in May 2011 on this issue. In this essay, I summarized my historical scholarship I had published up to that point in law journals on the legal definition and protection of patents in the Founding Era and in the early American Republic. I concluded that a shift to a first-to-file patent system contradicted both the constitutional text and the early judicial interpretations of the patent statutes that secured patent rights to first inventors.

This legal issue will likely reach the courts one day. A constitutional challenge a couple years ago was rightly dismissed as not being justiciable, but there may yet be an appropriate case in which an inventor is denied a patent given that he or she lost the race to file first in the Patent Office. So, after sharing my essay with my friends, I thought it valuable to post it again on the Internet, because the website on which it was first published (www.noonHR1249.com) slipped into digital oblivion long ago.

I was asked to write this essay in May 2011 by the U.S. Business & Industry Council (USBIC)[1] The USBIC requested my scholarly analysis of the first-to-file provision of the AIA, which was being debated as H.R. 1249 on Capitol Hill at the time, because I had been publishing articles in law journals on the legal definition and protection of patents as property rights in the Founding Era and in the early American Republic (see here and here for two examples). In my essay, I identified the relevant text in the Constitution, which authorizes Congress to secure an exclusive right to “Inventors” in their “Discoveries” (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8). Based on my academic research, I summarized in my essay the historical Supreme Court and lower federal court decisions, which secured patents to inventors according to the same policy justifications used in common-law cases to justify property rights to first possessors of land. Thus, I concluded that the first-to-file provision in the American Invents Act was unconstitutional, based on well-recognized arguments concerning textual analysis of the Constitution and inferences from original public meaning as reflected in the historical judicial record.

There’s more to my essay, though, than just the substantive legal argument. It also provides an insight into the nature of the legal academic debates going back many years, because at the time Professor Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School compared me to an “Obama-birther” and he called this constitutional and legal argument “fringe science.” Given concerns expressed last year in an open letter co-authored by Professor Lemley and others about inappropriate rhetoric used by academics, among other issues (see here for a news report on this letter), it bears noting for the record that this is a concern that goes back many years.

Here’s the basic story: My essay was published by the USBIC in May 2011 and I was invited to speak in congressional staffer briefings and in other venues in Capitol Hill against the AIA on this issue. At this time, I was the only legal academic writing and speaking on Capitol Hill on this issue in the AIA. In late May, the 21st Century Coalition for Patent Reform, which supported enactment of the AIA, distributed on Capitol Hill a response that it had solicited from Professor Lemley. I no longer possess this response statement that was sent out via email by the 21st Century Coalition, but I do have the response I was asked to write on June 1, 2011 in which I explicitly refer to Professor Lemley’s argument against the first-to-invent position. In response to a law professors’ letter to Congress defending the first-to-file provision in the AIA that was circulated on an IP professors listserv (IPProfs), I sent out on IPProfs on June 11 a draft letter to Congress, calling for signatures from other law professors in support of my argument first presented in my essay (the final version is here). The next day, on June 12, Professor Lemley wrote on Facebook that my constitutional and legal argument made me the same as an “Obama-birther.”[2] Although he didn’t refer directly to me, it was clear that it was directed at me given that this posting by Lemley followed the day after my email to all IP professors asking them to join my letter to Congress, and I also was the only law professor actively writing on this issue and speaking on it on Capitol Hill up until then.

The following year, in a New York Times article on the court challenge to the first-to-file provision, Professor Lemley further characterized this constitutional argument as “the legal equivalent of fringe science.”

Before the spring of 2011, my writings on legal doctrine and policy were published only in law journals, and I had never participated in a policy debate over patent legislation. In my academic articles before this time, I had critiqued Professor Lemley’s incorrect historical claims about whether U.S. patents were considered monopolies or property rights, and they reflected a purely academic tone that one should expect in a law journal article (see here). Before spring 2011, I had never addressed Professor Lemley, nor had he addressed me, about the AIA, other legislation or court cases.

Professor Lemley’s “Obama-birther” attack on me was surprising, and when I replied in the comments to his Facebook post solely on the substantive merits of the issue of policy versus law, Professor Lemley defended his accusation against me. (This is evidenced in the screen shot.)[2] At the time, I was still a relatively junior academic, and this was an object lesson about what a senior academic at a top-five-ranked law school considers acceptable in addressing a much-more junior academic with whom he disagrees. This remark in 2011 was not an outlier either, as Professor Lemley has used similar rhetoric in the ensuing years in addressing academics with whom he disagrees; for instance, a couple years ago, Professor Lemley publicly referred to an academic conference that I and other patent scholars participated in as a “Tea Party convention.”

Of course, legal and constitutional disputes consist of opposing arguments. In court cases and legislative debates, there are colorable legal and policy arguments on both sides of a dispute. Few issues are so irrational that they are not even cognizable as having a supporting argument, such as astrology and conspiracy theories like the birthers or 9-11 truthers. So, I will simply let my essay speak for itself as to whether it makes me the same as an “Obama-birther” and if my argument represents “fringe science.”

More important, if or when a good case arises in which an inventor can rightly claim an identifiable and specific harm as a result of the statutory change created by the AIA, I hope my essay will be of some value.

[1] Full disclosure: The U.S. Business & Industry Council paid me for my time in writing the essay, which I disclosed in the essay itself. Unfortunately, as recently reported by IAM Magazine, other legal academics are not always so forthcoming about their financial and legal connections to companies when publicly commenting on court cases or advocating for enactment of legislation.

[2] This is a link to a screen shot I took last year only because the Facebook post by Professor Lemley recently disappeared after I only quoted the language from it about a month ago when I shared on Facebook my essay with my friends and colleagues.

UPDATE on June 7: I added some more supporting links and some additional information after this was initially published on June 6, 2016.

Filed under: constitutional law, Founders, intellectual property, patent, patent reform Tagged: America Invents Act, Birther, first to file, first to invent, HR1249, inventor, MadStad Engineering, Mark Lemley, Patent, Patent Office

On March 31, a federal judge gave the city of Boston six months to rectify the disparities between the way it treats Transportation Network Companies (“TNC”) (such as Uber and Lyft) and taxicab companies. This comes pursuant to an order by US District Court Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton in a suit filed by members of the Boston taxi industry against the city and various officials. The suit is an interesting one because it reveals unusual fault lines in the ongoing struggle between taxi companies, local regulators, and the way that federal law recognizes and respects property and economic rights.

Read the full piece here.

The Federal Circuit handed down a victory for free expression today — in the commercial context no less. At issue was the Lanham Act’s § 2(a) prohibition of trademark registrations that…

Read the full piece here. 

Last July, the Eastern District of Virginia upheld the cancellation of various trademarks of the Washington Redskins on the grounds that the marks were disparaging to Native Americans. I am neither a fan of football, nor of offensive names for sports teams–what I am is a fan of free speech. Although the Redskins may be well advised to change their team name, interfering with both the team’s right to free speech as well as its property right in the registered mark is the wrong way–both legally and in principle–to achieve socially desirable ends.

Various theories have been advanced, but the really interesting part of the dispute–a topic upon which I published a paper this year–is the likelihood that the Lanham Act’s prohibition of immoral, scandalous, or disparaging marks runs afoul of the First Amendment. I was cheered to see this week that the First Amendment Lawyers Association filed an amicus brief largely along the lines of my paper. However, there were a couple of points that I still feel deserve more attention when thinking about the § 2(a) (the Lanham Act’s so-called “morality clauses”).

Trademarks Are Not License Plates

The district court tried to sidestep the First Amendment issue by declaring that the trademarks themselves are not at issue, but merely the right to register the trademarks. To reach its result, the court relied on the recent Walker case wherein the Supreme Court declared that Texas was at liberty to prevent Confederate flags from appearing on its license plates, since license plates could be considered the speech of the government.

However, there is an important distinction between license plates and trademarks. License plates are a good totally of government manufacture. One cannot drive a car on a public road without applying to the government for permission and affixing a government registration tag on the vehicle. The plate is not a blank slate upon which one may express one’s self, but is a state-issued information placard used for law enforcement purposes.

Trademarks, arising as they do from actual use, preexist federal recognition. The Lanham Act merely provides a mechanism for registering trademarks that happen to be used in interstate commerce. The federal government then chooses to recognize that trademark when contested or offered for registration.

This is a major distinction: the social field of trademarks already exists – the federal government has chosen to regulate and provide an enforcement mechanism for these property rights and speech acts when used in interstate commerce. Thus it is the market for trademarks that constitutes the forum, and not the physically recorded government register. Given that the government has interfered in a preexisting market in a way in which it protects some state-created trademark property rights, but not others, is it proper to regulate speech by virtue of its content? I think not.

Further, license plates are obviously government property to anyone who looks at them. Plates bear the very name of the state directly on their face. The system of trademark registration is a largely invisible process that only becomes relevant during legal proceedings. When the public looks at a given trademark I would argue that the state’s imprimatur is certainly one of the last things of which they would think.

Thus, a restriction on “immoral” or “disparaging” trademarks constitutes viewpoint discrimination. Eugene Volokh echoed this sentiment when he wrote on the refusal to register “Stop the Islamisation of America”:

Trademark registration … is a government benefit program open to a wide array of speakers with little quality judgment. Like other such programs … it should be seen as a form of “limited public forum,” in which the government may impose content-based limits but not viewpoint-based ones. An exclusion of marks that disparage groups while allowing marks that praise those groups strikes me as viewpoint discrimination.

The Lanham Act endows registrants with government-guaranteed legal rights in connection with the words and symbols by which they are recognized in society. Particularly in a globalized, interconnected society, the brand of an entity is a significant component of how it speaks to society. Discriminating against marks as “immoral” or “disparaging” can be nothing short of viewpoint discrimination.

Commercial Speech Is Protected Speech

As everyone is well aware, the First Amendment provides broad protection for a wide spectrum of speech. The definition of speech itself is likewise broad, including not only words, but also non-verbal gestures and symbols. Any governmental curtailing of such speech will be “presumptively invalid,” with the burden of rebutting that presumption on the government.

When speech is undertaken as part of commerce it does not magically lose any political, social or religious dimension it had when in a noncommercial context. Cartoons issued bearing the image of the Prophet as part of a commercial magazine are surely a political statement deserving of protection. The situation is the same if an organization adopts a logo that is derisive to a particular political or religious ideology – that publication is making a protected, expressive statement through its branding.

At first glance, one might think that defenders of § 2(a) would attempt to qualify scandalous and immoral trademarks as “obscene” and thereby render them subject to censorship. But, in McGinley the Federal Circuit explicitly refused to apply the obscenity standards from the Supreme Court to §2(a) on the grounds that the Lanham Act does not itself use the word “obscenity.” Instead, the Federal Circuit, following the TTAB, was of the opinion that “[w]hat is denied are the benefits provided by the Lanham Act which enhance the value of a mark” and that the appellant still had legal recourse under state common law. Therefore, so the court in McGinley reasoned, since the right to use the mark is not actually abridged, no expression is abridged. And this is the primary basis upon which the district court in Pro-Football built its argument that no First Amendment concerns were implicated in canceling the Redskins trademark.

This of course willfully ignores once again the notion that in intervening in the field of trademarks, and in favoring certain speakers over others, courts effectively allows the Lanham Act to amplify preferred speech and burden disfavored speech. This is true whether or not we classify the trademark right as a bundle of procedural rights (which in turn make speech competitively possible) or as pure speech directly.

That said, it’s much more in keeping with the tradition of the First Amendment to understand trademarks as a protected category of commercial speech. The Supreme Court has noted that otherwise commercial information may at times be more urgent than even political dialog, and that information relating to a financial incentive was not necessarily commercial for First Amendment purposes. “[S]ignificant societal interests are served by such speech.” This is so because even entirely commercial speech “may often carry information of import to significant issues of the day.”

Even were commercial speech not fully protected–as I believe it to be–the Supreme Court has also recognized that commercial speech may be so intertwined with noncommercial speech so as to make them inseparable for First Amendment purposes. In particular, commercial messages do more than merely provide information about the characteristics of goods and services:

[S]olicitation is characteristically intertwined with informative and perhaps persuasive speech seeking support for particular causes or for particular views on economic, political, or social issues, and for the reality that without solicitation the flow of such information and advocacy would likely cease.

The analogy to trademarks is rather clear in this context. Although trademarks may refer to a particular product or service, that product or service is not of necessity a purely commercial object. Further, even if the product or service is a commercial object, the trademark itself can be, or can become, a symbolic referent and not a mere sales pitch. Consider, for instance, Mickey Mouse. The iconic mouse ears certainly represent a vast commercial empire generally, and specifically operate as a functional trademark for Mickey Mouse cartoons and merchandise. However, is there not much more of cultural significance to the mark than mere commercial value? The mouse ears represent something culturally – about childhood, about America, and about art – that is much more than merely a piece of pricing or quality information.

The Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine Prevents Trading Rights for Privileges

The district court (and Federal Circuit, for that matter) have missed a very important dimension in summarily dismissing First Amendment concerns of trademark holders. These courts dismiss owners of “immoral” or “disparaging” trademarks on the belief that no actual harm is done – the mark holders still own the mark, and, as far as the court is concerned, no speech has been suppressed. However, trademark registration, in addition to providing a forum in which to speak, also provides real procedural benefits for the mark holder. For instance, businesses and individuals enjoy a nationwide recognition of their presence and can vindicate their interests in federal courts. Without the federal registration that is presumptively supplied to marks that are not “immoral” or “scandalous,” an individual can find himself attempting to protect his interests in a mark in the courts of every state in which he does business.

However, under the unconstitutional conditions doctrine even though the benefits of trademark registration are not constitutionally guaranteed rights, those benefits cannot be offered in exchange for a trademark owner’s loss of actually guaranteed rights. Thus, the tight link between trademark registration and First Amendment protections that the courts just keep ignoring.

Its also worth noting that this doctrine did not emerge in constitutional jurisprudence until after the period in which the Lanham Act was drafted. Instead, the Lanham Act era was characterized by the rights-privileges distinction–made famous by then Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Oliver Wendell Holmes. In McAuliffe, a police officer sued for reinstatement after he was dismissed for his participation in a political organization. In dismissing the case, Chief Justice Holmes held that “[t]he petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.” This quote from Holmes captures precisely the sense in which the Federal Circuit dismisses the First Amendment concerns of mark holders. 

In contrast to this rather antiquated view, the Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed the proposition that “the government may not deny a benefit to a person because he exercises a constitutional right.” Although this principle contains exceptions, it has been applied to a wide variety of situations including refusal to renew teaching contracts over First Amendment-protected speech acts, and infringement of the right to travel by refusing to adequately extend healthcare benefits to sick persons who had not been residents of a county for at least a year.

Basically, the best defense one can offer for § 2(a) is rooted in an outmoded view of the First Amendment that is, to put it mildly, unconstitutional. We don’t shut down speakers who offend us (at least for the time being), and we should stop attacking trademarks that we find to be immoral.

Filed under: First amendment, intellectual property, Trademark Tagged: First Amendment, Intellectual property, trademark

Summary

“This case is not about broadband deployment or competition, nor local autonomy. It is about the FCC’s claim of sweeping power and its essentially unchecked discretion to govern the Internet, including the supposed power to preempt decisions made by elected state lawmakers—without Congressional authorization.

To reject the FCC’s reinterpretation of Section 706 as an independent grant of authority is not to say that nothing more need be done to promote broadband deployment and competition—but to affirm two facts about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (“1996 Act”). First, Congress intended Section 706 as a command to the FCC to use the abundant authority granted to it elsewhere in the 1934 Communications Act (“1934 Act”) to promote broadband deployment to all Americans. As the FCC said in 1998:

“After reviewing the language of section 706(a), its legislative history, the broader statutory scheme, and Congress’ policy objectives, we agree with numerous commenters that section 706(a) does not constitute an independent grant of forbearance authority or of authority to employ other regulating methods. Rather, we conclude that section 706(a) directs the Commission to use the authority granted in other provisions, including the forbearance authority under section 10(a), to encourage the deployment of advanced services. Advanced Services Order, ¶ 69 (emphasis added)”

Second, rejecting the FCC’s reinterpretation means affirming that Congress intended “to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation,” 47 U.S.C. § 230(b)(2); see also 47 U.S.C. § 230(a)(5) (“The Internet and other interactive computer services have flourished, . . . with a minimum of government regulation.”)…”