Tomorrow, Geoffrey Manne, Executive Director of the International Center for Law & Economics, will be a panelist at the Cato Institute’s Policy Forum, “The ITC and Digital Trade: The ClearCorrect Decision.” He will be joined by Sapna Kumar, Associate Professor, University of Houston Law Center and Shara Aranoff, Of Counsel, Covington and Burling LLP, and former Chairman of the U.S. International Trade Commission (“ITC”).
The forum is focused on a recent Federal Circuit decision, ClearCorrect v. ITC, in which a divided three judge panel overturned a 5-1 majority decision of the ITC holding that the Tariff Act granted it the power to prevent the importation of digital articles that infringe a valid U.S. patent. Key to the Federal Circuit’s decision was a hyper-textualist parsing of the term “article” as understood in 1929–a move that stands in stark contrast to the Federal Circuit’s recent en banc decision in Suprema, which was crucially based on a wider reading of the context of the Tariff Act in order to understand the the full meaning of the phrase “articles … that infringe” as contained therein.
Critics of the ITC’s interpretation in this matter contend that such jurisdiction would somehow grant the ITC the power to regulate the Internet. However, far from being an expansive power grab, the ITC’s decision was in fact well reasoned and completely consistent with the Tariff Act and Congressional intent. Nonetheless, this remains an important case because the cost of the Federal Circuit’s error could be very high given the importance of IP to the national economy.
Full details on the event:
“The ITC and Digital Trade: The ClearCorrect Decision”
Wednesday, December 9, 2015 at 12 PM EDT.
F. A. Hayek Auditorium (located on the lobby level of the Cato Institute)
1000 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.
Washington, D.C.
Registration begins at 11:30 a.m.
More from us on this and related topics:
False Teeth: Why An ITC Case Won’t Chew Up The Internet (Forbes)
Suprema v. ITC: The Case for Chevron Deference
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