Patent Infringement as Criminal Conduct
Criminal and civil law differ greatly in their use of the element of intent. The purposes of intent in each legal system are tailored to effectuate very different goals. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A., 131 S. Ct. 2060 (2011), however, imported a criminal concept of intent — willful blindness — into the statute for patent infringement, a civil offense, despite these differences. This importation of a criminal law concept of intent into the patent statute is novel and calls for examination. This Article compares the purposes behind intent in criminal law with the purposes behind intent in patent law to demonstrate that this importation does not achieve the policy goals of the patent regime. Criminal law jurisprudence requires an intent element for three reasons: to ascribe a level of moral blameworthiness to an act, to separate criminal from civil liability, and to shield otherwise innocently acting defendants from criminal punishment. Patent infringement actions, by contrast, lack an intent element because they almost exclusively seek to remedy economic harms. The importation of criminal concepts of knowledge into the patent infringement statute may therefore lead to unwanted consequences, particularly, higher-than-warranted burdens of proof for patent holders. To this end, equating criminal mental states to civil ones risks treating patent infringement as criminal conduct. This Article concludes by proposing that courts should examine the purposes of mental state requirements on a statute-by-statute basis.
Does High-Frequency Trading Matter?
Over the past few decades, financial markets have undergone remarkable reforms as a result of developments in computer technology and changing regulations, which have dramatically altered the structures and the properties of financial markets. The advances in technology have largely increased the speed of communication and trading. This has given birth to the development of algorithmic trading (AT) and high-frequency trading (HFT). The proliferation of AT and HFT has raised many issues regarding their impacts on the market. This paper proposes a framework characterized by an agent-based artificial stock market where market phenomena result from the interaction between many heterogeneous non-HFTs and HFTs. In comparison with the existing literature on the agent-based modeling of HFT, the traders in our model adopt a genetic programming (GP) learning algorithm. Since they are more adaptive and heuristic, they can form quite diverse trading strategies, rather than zero-intelligence strategies or pre-specified fundamentalist or chartist strategies. Based on this framework, this paper examines the effects of HFT on price discovery, market stability, volume, and allocative efficiency loss.
Aristocratic Century: The sinews of power: political
In his excellent book on the Secretaries of State, Mark Thomson offered ‘the paradox of continuing domination of the aristocracy and the simultaneous insignificance of the House of Lords, per se ’. It is true that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the supremacy of the House of Commons in financial matters was a wellestablished convention. The claims of the Commons to an undisputed control over money matters, which had been urged before the Civil War, were resumed immediately after the Restoration and a protracted dispute with the House of Lords began. In 1661 the Lords resolved that there were no precedents in history for this new claim by the House of Commons. In 1671, the Commons retorted that taxation ought not to be questioned by the Lords and in 1678 they reiterated that supply was ‘the undoubted and sole right of the Commons’ and ‘ought not to be changed or altered by the House of Lords’. The Lords' attempt in 1692 to assess their own taxes was also abandoned, though they retired under cover of a rather insubstantial smoke-screen that they maintained their power of amendment to be a ‘fundamental, inherent and undoubted right from which their lordships can never depart’. That established, they departed. Geoffrey Holmes quotes a nice example from 1702 when the bishop of Carlisle found himself the only peer answering to a money bill, ‘no other lord in the House regarded what was doing, this being only (pro forma) to preserve a seeming right to dissent from, or amend, any part of a money bill’.