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Trademark's 'Ship Of Theseus' Problem, Matthew T. Bodie

All Faculty Scholarship

The story of the ship of Theseus has long presented a puzzle over the nature of identity. Preserving the boat over time, the ancient Greeks would remove its wooden planks as they rotted and replace them with new planks. The question arose: was this still the same ship?

The problem hits at an issue that is critical to trademark law but has largely been overlooked: namely, what is the identity of the entity that holds the mark? And how do we determine whether that has changed over time? The law provides straightforward answers: it assigns the mark to the business …