Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, a primary sponsor of the America Invents Act, is once again exploring pressing patent management issues by urging the National Institutes of Health to invoke the march-in rights afforded to it under the Bayh-Dole Act and force Myriad Genetics to license its breast and ovarian cancer testing protocols in the name of public health.

Indiana University confirmed earlier this week that the number of invention disclosures filed by faculty and researchers nearly doubled between FY 2009 and FY 2012. As a result, the greater Indianapolis area is gaining a reputation as one of the nation's most promising emerging innovation hubs.

An Arizona inventor was recently forced to swallow a bitter pill after a lucrative stream of patent licensing revenue was cut off by the application of a controversial Supreme Court precedent.

The threats posed by pay-for-delay patent strategies were thrust into the spotlight last month as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission authorized antitrust investigators to more closely examine these controversial business practices. A new study released by two nonprofit public interest groups is now adding depth to the conversation, presenting objective evidence for the financial burden brand name drug manufacturers are imposing on consumers.

The concept of copyright is based on the notion that creators of an original work are entitled to equitable compensation for their production, and consumers are entitled to an authentic version of that good. But in the complicated climate of literary copyrights, traditional intellectual property protection may actually be suppressing the long-term availability and consumption of writers' works.

At a patent and antitrust seminar held in New York last week, Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Edith Ramirez announced that her agency would be launching a comprehensive investigation into the recent spike in patent litigation rates in an effort to gather much-needed practical evidence concerning the commercial consequences of such activity.

BuzzFeed's rise to social content supremacy is largely attributable to the engaging photos and videos that populate its posts, but this popularity has attracted new questions as to how the website sources some of the visual media it publishes. Most notably, BuzzFeed is facing a $3.6 million copyright infringement suit from an independent photographer claiming images were lifted from his online portfolio without consent and repurposed by the news site.

Leading video game developer and distributor Electronic Arts is having its royalty management protocols called into question after a former employee came forward to demand significant financial damages for alleged misappropriation of programming code.

After obtaining patents to cover a new prescription medication, several large pharmaceutical companies have recently pursued so-called pay-for-delay, or reverse payment, strategies that effectively compensate generic drugmakers for their promise not to challenge the patents held by the larger firm or introduce competitive offerings to the marketplace for a set period of time. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has decried these potentially anti-competitive practices for several years, but this week the agency received its strongest show of support yet from the highest court in the land.

As the literary world makes the jump from hardcovers and paperbacks to tablet computers and dedicated eReaders, authors are encountering an entirely new slate of risks and rewards. As they strive to expand their audience and without deflating content value, writers will need a keen knowledge of emerging royalty management realities.