How Intellectual Property Ends

Abstract

Intellectual property rights, unlike rights in land and chattels, come to an end. Despite the doctrinal complexity and practical significance of IP’s terminal mechanisms, scholarship has scarcely focused on them, and none has analyzed these doctrines as a unified field. As a result, the discourse around IP’s terminal doctrines remains impoverished, with courts, legislatures, and commentators offering imprecise and inconsistent formulations that obscure the rationales for ending IP rights. This Article offers the first comprehensive taxonomy of IP’s terminal mechanisms, providing much-needed conceptual and definitional coherence. It then reveals the underappreciated policy leverage these mechanisms can deliver. Finally, it considers new and creative ways that IP’s terminal doctrines could be enlisted to address a range of IP policy concerns and what lessons, if any, traditional property law might learn from how IP ends.

Keywords: copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, intellectual property, abandonment, invalidation, forfeiture, expiration