The George Washington Law Review is exceedingly proud to announce that Professor Kristen Osenga’s article Debugging Software’s Schemas has been selected for publication in the 2015 edition of the Intellectual Property Law Review. Professor Osenga published with the Law Review in Volume 82, Number 6, our symposium edition, Cracking the Code: Ongoing Section 101 Patentability Concerns in Biotechnology and Computer Software.
Professor Osenga is a Professor of Law at University of Richmond School of Law, teaching courses in Patent Law, Trademark & Unfair Competition, International Intellectual Property, and Property Law Legislation & Regulation. We were extremely thankful for Professor Osenga’s participation in our symposium and for publishing with the Law Review. Today we have the delight of announcing her article’s selection as one of the best law review articles on intellectual property law published this last year. As such, it will be republished in the Intellectual Property Law Review, an anthology published annually by Thomson Reuters (West).
The abstract of Debugging Software’s Schemas, 82 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1832 (2014) appears below.
There are two general schemas that are shaping current discussions about software and computer-related invention patents—that software patents are generally bad (the bad patent schema) and that software patent holders are problematic (the troll schema). Because these frameworks were created and are maintained through a series of cognitive biases, they suffer from a variety of bugs. A larger flaw in the system, however, is that using these two schemas to frame the issue of patent eligibility for software and computer-related inventions misses the underlying question that is at the heart of the analysis—what is an unpatentable “abstract idea.” To improve the present debate about the patent eligibility for these inventions, it is therefore critical that the software patent system be debugged.
The full article is available here, in our print edition, and on HeinOnline.
