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Full-Text Articles in Law
Owning Mark(Et)S, Mark A. Lemley, Mark P. Mckenna
Owning Mark(Et)S, Mark A. Lemley, Mark P. Mckenna
Michigan Law Review
Trademark owners regularly rely on claims that the defendant is "free riding" on their mark by making money using that mark, money the trademark owners say should belong to them. We analyze those free-riding claims and find them wanting. The empirical data shows that defendants in unrelated markets can benefit from using a well-known mark, but that neither mark owners nor consumers suffer any injury from that use. A legal claim that a defendant is unjustly benefiting by using a plaintiff's mark is hollow unless it is accompanied by a theory of why that benefit should rightly belong to the …
The Illusory Right To Abandon, Eduardo M. Penalver
The Illusory Right To Abandon, Eduardo M. Penalver
Michigan Law Review
The unilateral and unqualified nature of the right to abandon (at least as it is usually described) appears to make it a robust example of the law's concern to safeguard the individual autonomy interests that many contemporary commentators have identified as lying at the heart of the concept of private ownership. The doctrine supposedly empowers owners of chattels freely and unilaterally to abandon them by manifesting the clear intent to do so, typically by renouncing possession of the object in a way that communicates the intent to forgo any future claim to it. A complication immediately arises, however due to …