Dr Sivaramjani Thambisetty, NAB 7.29

This course is primarily intended for students enrolled on the LLM. Students enrolled on MSc Law and Accounting, MSc Biomedicine, Bioscience, and Society and MSc Law, Anthropology and Society may take the course subject to the approval of the course coordinator.

This course is capped at 30 students. All students are required to obtain permission from the Teacher Responsible to take it, by completing the online application form linked to the course selection on LSEforYou.

This course critically examines UK and European patent law from different perspectives including the economic case for incentivising innovation, industry and technological-specificity of legal doctrine, international economic and political frameworks, institutional features, and legal developments in the domestic laws of other countries as well as at regional and international levels. Case studies from comparable jurisdictions such as US, India or Latin America will be used where appropriate.

Topics to be covered will include:

• The economics of invention - incentives, innovation and proprietary rights.
• The scope and reach of patents as exclusionary rights
• Industry and technology specific protection of inventions
• Criteria of patentability: novelty, non obviousness, industrial applicability, sufficiency of disclosure;
• Statutory and policy exclusions (medical inventions, inventions against morality, plant and animal varieties, computer programs and business methods)
• Claim construction and infringement; Defences to infringement
• Trade and Intellectual Property
• Institutions, and the 'international' patent system.

• Genomic Inventions and synthetic biology
• Nanotechnology
• Invention and innovation in the computing industry
• Pharmaceutical patents and the Doha Agreement;
• Patent offices - politics and power
• Patent litigation and other strategies for the enforcement of patents
• The European patent court

Weekly two hour seminars.

Students are asked to submit two 2,000 word essays.

Core Textbook: Bently and Sherman, Intellectual Property Law, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Students will be expected to read widely in appropriate journals and books. Detailed reading lists will be provided during the course, the following is a recommended reading list:

Recommended: Pila The Requirement for an Invention in Patent Law Oxford University Press 2010, Spence Intellectual Property, Clarendon Law Series 2007, Roughton, Cook and Spence (Eds) The Modern Law of Patents Butterworths 2005, Landes and Posner The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law Harvard University Press 2003, Ducor, Patenting the Recombinant Products of Biotechnology, Kluwer Publications 1998, Jaffe & Lerner, Innovation and its Discontents, Princeton University Press 2004, Bessen and Meurer Patent Failure: How Judges Bureacrats and Lawyers Put Innovators and Risk Princeton University Press 2008, Drahos 'Patent Reform for Innovation and Risk Management' KEStudies (Vol 1) 2007, Burk and Lemley 'Policy Levers in Patent Law' 89 Virginia Law Review 1575 (2003), Commission on Intellectual Property Rights Integrating Intellectual Property Rights and Development Policy 2002.

One three-hour written paper, accounting for 100% of the final grade.