Law Commons^™

Trademark Law, Functional Design Features, And The Trouble With Traffix, Harold R. Weinberg

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article concerns trademark law's functionality doctrine and the Supreme Court's troublesome opinion concerning it in TrafFix Devices, Inc. v. Marketing Displays, Inc. The doctrine provides that if a producer's useful or aesthetic design feature is "functional," then competitors can lawfully copy it even if the feature otherwise would be protected against copying by trademark principles. In order to introduce the functionality doctrine and the trouble with TrafFix, it is helpful to describe the nature of design features, the simultaneous roles they may play as source-identifying trade symbols and as useful or aesthetic product elements, and trademark law's place …

Introduction: From Sheet Music To Mp3 Files—A Brief Perspective On Napster, Harold R. Weinberg

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Napster case is the current cause celebre of the digital age. The story has color. It involves music-sharing technology invented by an eighteen-year-old college dropout whose high school classmates nicknamed him "The Napster" on account of his perpetually kinky hair. The story has drama. Depending on your perspective, it pits rapacious big music companies against poor and hardworking students who just want to enjoy some tunes; or it pits creative and industrious music companies seeking a fair return on their invested effort, time, and money against greedy and irreverent music thieves. And the case has importance. Music maybe intellectual …

Preserving The Public Trust In State-Owned Intellectual Property: A Recommendation For Legislative Action, Sharon Sandeen

Faculty Scholarship

Whether a state chooses to dedicate its intellectual property to the public domain or derive revenue from the licensing of its rights, absent express authority on the subject there is uncertainty. State employees who are aware of the existence of state-owned intellectual property are not certain how it should be managed or if they are authorized to expend state resources to pursue infringement claims. Individuals and entities who wish to use state-owned intellectual property do not know how to obtain permission for such use and without permission they cannot be certain that they will not be sued for infringement. Without …

Shifting The Paradigm In E-Commerce: Move Over Inherently Distinctive Trademarks, The E-Brand, I-Brand And Generic Domain Names Ascending To Power?, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

“What's in a name!” laments Juliet at her Shakespearean balcony. Four hundred years later, in the world of e-commerce, Juliet's question would be “What's in a domain name?” After spending all of the Montague's wealth, Romeo might be able to respond, “Call me but love.com.” The price tag for some generic domain names cost a small fortune: Sex.com for $250 million, Business.com for $7.5 million, Broadband.com for $6 million, Loans.com for $3 million, Flu.com for $1.4 million, and Bingo.com for $1.1 million.

In 1995, Procter and Gamble registered hundreds of generic domain names and offered them for sale at auction …

Should It Be A Free For All? The Challenge Of Extending Trade Dress Protection To The Look And Feel Of Web Sites, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

In the e-commerce world, a company's web site becomes the primary communication center with the customer. The web site is where the company displays products, presents marketing materials, and provides sales and post-sales support. Increasingly, companies are spending valuable resources to build and maintain their web sites. With the rapid change in web technology, many web sites now feature more than just ordinary text. Color, clipart, graphics, designs, animations, and sounds are now part of the overall appearance of web sites. Yet copying an image from a web site is just one click away. What protection is available to the …

Commentary On Economic And Ethical Reasons For Protecting Data, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Like Jane Ginsburg, I would like to drop back a bit, to talk about more general principles. Essentially, both of our primary speakers focused on a distinction between property and non-property modes of protecting data. I would like to highlight the economic and ethical reasons for maintaining that distinction.