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American University Washington College of Law

Intellectual Property Law

Lanham Act

2017

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Law

Moral Judgments In Trademark Law, Ned Snow Jan 2017

Moral Judgments In Trademark Law, Ned Snow

American University Law Review

Under the federal Lanham Act, eligibility for trademark protection depends on whether a mark is sufficiently moral. The Federal Circuit has recently held this provision of the Act to be unconstitutional based on its interpretation of speech doctrine. The context of trademark law, however, refutes this interpretation. Indeed, speech doctrine appears to support this morality requirement. Nevertheless, there seems to be another reason that the Federal Circuit held the morality requirement unconstitutional: the judicial discomfort with morality serving as a basis for law. This Essay concludes that this judicial discomfort is unjustified in this instance. From both a constitutional and …


2016 Trademark Law Decisions Of The Federal Circuit, Anita B. Polott, Rachel E. Fertig Jan 2017

2016 Trademark Law Decisions Of The Federal Circuit, Anita B. Polott, Rachel E. Fertig

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.


No Trademark, No Problem, Christine Farley Jan 2017

No Trademark, No Problem, Christine Farley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Does the Lanham Act permit a foreign business that has neither used nor registered its trademark in the United States to sue the owner of a U.S. trademark for its use of the same mark in the U.S.? A recent case from the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit addressed this consequential question. In Belmora, LLC.v. Bayer Consumer Care A G, the Court of Appeals surprised the legal community and answered this question in the affirmative, reversing the district court's decision to reject the trademark claim because it was unsupported by a federally protected U.S. trademark.The Belmora decision has …


No Trademark, No Problem, Christine Haight Farley Jan 2017

No Trademark, No Problem, Christine Haight Farley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Does the Lanham Act permit a foreign business that has neither used nor registered its trademark in the United States to sue the owner of a U.S. trademark for its use of the same mark in the U.S.? A recent case from the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit addressed this consequential question. In Belmora, LLC.v. Bayer Consumer Care A G, the Court of Appeals surprised the legal community and answered this question in the affirmative, reversing the district court's decision to reject the trademark claim because it was unsupported by a federally protected U.S. trademark.

The Belmora decision …