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Articles 1 - 30 of 48
Full-Text Articles in Intellectual Property Law
Raising The Threshold For Trademark Infringement Protect Free Expression, Christine Haight Farley, Lisa P. Ramsey
Raising The Threshold For Trademark Infringement Protect Free Expression, Christine Haight Farley, Lisa P. Ramsey
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
The First Amendment right to free speech limits the scope of rights in trademark law. Congress and the courts have devised various defenses and common law doctrines to ensure that protected speech is exempted from trademark infringement liability. These defensive trademark doctrines, however, are narrow and often vary by jurisdiction. One current example is the speech-protective test first articulated by the Second Circuit in Rogers v. Grimaldi, expanded by the Ninth Circuit, and recently restricted by the Supreme Court in Jack Daniel’s Properties v. VIP Products to uses of another’s mark within an expressive work that do not designate the …
Here’S Why It’S Time The Lanham Act Recognizes Personal Brands, Golden Gate University School Of Law
Here’S Why It’S Time The Lanham Act Recognizes Personal Brands, Golden Gate University School Of Law
GGU Law Review Blog
The Lanham Act defines and governs trademarks, service marks, and unfair competition, all to protect American consumers from market confusion. Under the Lanham Act, a mark is famous if it is “widely recognizable to the general consuming public of the United States.” When a celebrity brings a claim under the Lanham Act for the unauthorized use of their image, courts may find that the celebrity’s name and image constitute an unregistered trademark, while the celebrity’s persona is the goods or services which the celebrity places into commerce. To analyze the claim, several factors help determine the likelihood of market confusion. …
Edward S. Rogers, The Lanham Act, And The Common Law, Jessica Litman
Edward S. Rogers, The Lanham Act, And The Common Law, Jessica Litman
Book Chapters
This book chapter is a deep dive into the story of Edward Sidney Rogers's authorship of the legislation that became the Lanham Act. Because Rogers believed that Congress lacked the power to alter the substantive law of trademark and unfair competition, he crafted draft legislation that focused on registration and other procedural details rather than substantive rights and defenses. He sought to advance two incompatible goals: he hoped to preserve the robust common law of unfair competition while requiring, or at least encouraging, all trademark owners to register their marks. Both the supporters and the opponents of the bills that …
Symposium: Diamond Anniversary: 75 Years Of The Lanham Act, Jessica Litman
Symposium: Diamond Anniversary: 75 Years Of The Lanham Act, Jessica Litman
Articles
Thank you so much for inviting me. I think this is my fifth or sixth event with the Arts and Entertainment Law Journal. It’s always lots of fun, and I learn a lot. I’ve been spending the last couple of months doing a deep dive into everything Edward Sidney Rogers with no real agenda. I’m exploring what’s there, to see if there are any interesting stories I might tell. I found a few, so this afternoon I’ll tell one of them. I want to start with the mundane observation that intellectual prop-erty and intellectual property law are global. We’ve seen …
Trademarks In Conversation: Assessing Genericism After Booking.Com, Laura A. Heymann
Trademarks In Conversation: Assessing Genericism After Booking.Com, Laura A. Heymann
Faculty Publications
It is a fundamental principle of U.S. trademark law that to serve as a trademark, a word or phrase must “indicate the source” of the goods or services with which it is associated and, conversely, that a term that is understood to be the common name of a good or service is “generic” and cannot be protected as a trademark. Yet it still seems difficult to determine exactly what each concept means, particularly when the actual “source” of any goods or services might be opaque to consumers.
In part, this difficulty comes from the fact that status as a trademark …
United States Supreme Court Survey: 2018 Term: Iancu V. Brunetti: Free Speech Meets "Immoral And Scandalous" Trademarks In The Supreme Court, Niki Kuckes
Law Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Merging Offensive-Speech Cases With Viewpoint-Discrimination Principles: The Immediate Impact Of Matal V. Tam On Two Strands Of First Amendment Jurisprudence, Clay Calvert
UF Law Faculty Publications
This Article examines flaws with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Matal v. Tam that equated giving offense with viewpoint discrimination. Already, the Court’s language in Tam that “giving offense is a viewpoint” is being cited by multiple lower courts. This Article argues, however, that giving offense is not synonymous with viewpoint discrimination. This Article contends that the Court in Tam conflated two distinct strands of First Amendment jurisprudence—namely, its offensive-speech cases with principles against viewpoint discrimination. The Article proposes two possible paths forward to help courts better clarify when a case such as Tam should be analyzed as …
Non-Traditional Trademarks: The Error Costs Of Making An Exception The Rule, Glynn Lunney
Non-Traditional Trademarks: The Error Costs Of Making An Exception The Rule, Glynn Lunney
Faculty Scholarship
Over the last sixty years, courts and the USPTO have engaged in an ill-advised expansion of trademark subject matter. Where once only words or emblems attached to a product could serve as a trademark, today a product’s design or packaging itself may receive such protection. This expansion was and is a mistake. There may indeed be rare cases where a product’s design or packaging conveys brand-specific information and could receive protection without impairing competitor’s ability to offer substitutes. Such cases are the exception and not the rule, however. Extending the strong legal presumptions and property-like protection trademark law provides to …
U.S. Supreme Court Surveys: 2016 Term. Matal V. Tam: Free Speech Meets "Disparaging" Trademarks In The Supreme Court, Niki Kuckes
U.S. Supreme Court Surveys: 2016 Term. Matal V. Tam: Free Speech Meets "Disparaging" Trademarks In The Supreme Court, Niki Kuckes
Law Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors In Favor Of Judgement As A Matter Of Law, John A. Conway, Mark Mckenna
Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors In Favor Of Judgement As A Matter Of Law, John A. Conway, Mark Mckenna
Court Briefs
No. 3:14-cv-01849-K
Zenimax Media Inc. v. Oculus VR, LLC
From the Summary of ArgumentPlaintiff’s false designation of origin and false endorsement claims, such as they are, rest on the assertion that defendants falsely represented themselves as the origin of intellectual property on which the Oculus Rift is based. Those claims are barred by Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003), which holds that only confusion regarding the origin of physical goods is actionable under the Lanham Act.
Trending @ Rwu Law: Professor Niki Kuckes's Post: 'Disparaging' Trademarks Meet The First Amendment 02-07-2017, Niki Kuckes
Trending @ Rwu Law: Professor Niki Kuckes's Post: 'Disparaging' Trademarks Meet The First Amendment 02-07-2017, Niki Kuckes
Law School Blogs
No abstract provided.
Beyond Trademarks And Offense: Tam And The Justices’ Evolution On Free Speech, Clay Calvert
Beyond Trademarks And Offense: Tam And The Justices’ Evolution On Free Speech, Clay Calvert
UF Law Faculty Publications
In Matal v. Tam , the Supreme Court threw out the “disparagement clause” of the Lanham Act, the federal trademark law, because trademarks are private speech and thus regulating them based on government determinations of offensiveness violates the First Amendment. The solid outcome here contrasts with the narrow, incremental results in some other recent First Amendment cases that reached the Court.
No Trademark, No Problem, Christine Farley
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
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 …
The Commodification Of Trademarks: Some Final Thoughts On Trademark Dilution, Kenneth L. Port
The Commodification Of Trademarks: Some Final Thoughts On Trademark Dilution, Kenneth L. Port
Faculty Scholarship
This article is an explication of the trend toward commodification of famous or putatively famous trademarks and the resultant urging that the FTDA be repealed. This article starts with a literature review showing that the vast majority of commentators have been severely critical of the FTDA. This has been ignored by Congress. The article next pursues Congress's blind support of the FTDA and suggests that more thought and analysis from Congress is still required. The article next explains the data regarding FTDA claims. All reported cases from 1996 through 2015 are coded and examined. The conclusion, looking at the data, …
Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors, Mark Mckenna
Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors, Mark Mckenna
Court Briefs
No. 15-14889
Edward Lewis Tobinick v. Steven Novella
Appeal from the United States Distric Court for the Southern District of Florida, Case No.: 9:14-cv-80781-RLR (Hon. Robin L. Rosenber)
[Including the] Motion for Leave to File Brief of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors, Nov. 30, 2015.
From the Summary of Argument
The District Court correctly determined that the challenged speech of Dr. Steven Novella was not commercial speech for purposes of applying the Lanham Act. Appellant’s argument to the contrary conflates “seeking profit” with “commercial speech.”
Trademark's Ebay Problem, Peter J. Karol
Trademark's Ebay Problem, Peter J. Karol
Law Faculty Scholarship
This article explores the upheaval created within trademark law by eBay, Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C., asking why a simple doctrinal question (Should a patent remedies rule be extended to trademark cases?) has posed such problems for the courts. After a thorough review of past and present trademark injunction practice, and the Lanham Act’s legislative history, it finds that trademark law’s inability to assimilate eBay stems from unresolved substantive conflicts in the underlying legislation itself. In short, because the drafters could not settle on the proper scope of a federal trademark right, they hedged by granting a national exclusive right limited …
Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors In Support Of Appellees, Mark Mckenna
Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors In Support Of Appellees, Mark Mckenna
Court Briefs
The District Court correctly determined that Phoenix failed to state a trademark claim because Basket Case’s activities cannot have caused any relevant confusion.1 Phoenix’s fundamental complaint is about unauthorized use of its intangible content—karaoke tracks. Under Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003), however, only confusion regarding the source of physical goods is actionable under the Lanham Act; confusion regarding the source of the karaoke tracks or their authorization is not actionable. Phoenix cannot avoid Dastar just because Basket Case creates digital copies of those tracks, as Basket Case does not sell digital files or …
The Constitutional Limitation On Trademark Propertization, Peter J. Karol
The Constitutional Limitation On Trademark Propertization, Peter J. Karol
Law Faculty Scholarship
The following article seeks to apply the retrenchment in constitutional Commerce Clause jurisprudence of the last few decades to the phenomenon of trademark propertization, the expansive and largely federal movement towards protecting trademarks as assets apart from any connection to referent goods and services. Trademark scholars have filled the trademarks literature with critiques of propertization that generally object, on policy and historical grounds, to the trend and offer constructions of the Lanham Act designed to check its progress. With the notable exception of an article published in 2000 by Professor Kenneth Port, however, the literature has largely avoided addressing the …
Commercial Speech, Commercial Use, And The Intellectual Property Quagmire, Jennifer E. Rothman
Commercial Speech, Commercial Use, And The Intellectual Property Quagmire, Jennifer E. Rothman
All Faculty Scholarship
The commercial speech doctrine in First Amendment jurisprudence has frequently been criticized and is recognized as a highly contested, problematic and shifting landscape. Despite the compelling critique within constitutional law scholarship more broadly, Intellectual Property (“IP”) law has not only embraced the differential treatment of commercial speech, but has done so in ways that disfavor a much broader swath of speech than traditional commercial speech doctrine allows. One of the challenges for courts, litigants, and scholars alike is that the term “commercial” is used to mean multiple things, even within the same body of IP law. In this Article, I …
Stabilizing Morality In Trademark Law, Christine Haight Farley
Stabilizing Morality In Trademark Law, Christine Haight Farley
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
Almost all of the commentary concerning the statutory prohibition on registering offensive trademarks lambasts it as a misguided attempt to enforce civility through trademark law. This Article carefully considers the challenges accompanying section 2(a) of the U.S. Trademark Act and defends it as good policy. There are, however, a few instances in which the jurisprudence under section 2(a) has created more problems than it has solved. To alleviate these problems, this Article proposes judging words per se and abandoning the traditional trademark notion of evaluating words in context. Judging words per se is warranted given the very different objectives underlying …
Stabilizing Morality In Trademark Law, Christine Farley
Stabilizing Morality In Trademark Law, Christine Farley
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
Almost all of the commentary concerning the statutory prohibition on registering offensive trademarks lambasts it as a misguided attempt to enforce civility through trademark law. This Article carefully considers the challenges accompanying section 2(a) of the U.S. Trademark Act and defends it as good policy. There are, however, a few instances in which the jurisprudence under section 2(a) has created more problems than it has solved. To alleviate these problems, this Article proposes judging words per se and abandoning the traditional trademark notion of evaluating words in context. Judging words per se is warranted given the very different objectives underlying …
Supreme Court Amicus Brief Of Law Professors In Support Of Petitioner, Abraham V. Alpha Chi Omega, Christine Farley
Supreme Court Amicus Brief Of Law Professors In Support Of Petitioner, Abraham V. Alpha Chi Omega, Christine Farley
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
The Federal Lanham Act provides that injunctive relief, the primary remedy in trademark cases, is to be granted in accordance with the principles of equity. Expressly included among such equitable principles are the defenses of acquiescence, laches, and estoppel. Naturally, these defenses have become commonplace in defending against claims of trademark infringement. In the absence of a statute of limitations courts rely on the doctrine of laches, for example, to determine when trademark infringement claims have become stale. Our informal study of the district in which this case arises shows that from 2005 to 2011, nearly two thirds of answers …
Counterfeits, Copying And Class, Ann Bartow
Counterfeits, Copying And Class, Ann Bartow
Law Faculty Scholarship
Consumers who want to express themselves by wearing contemporary clothing styles should not have to choose between expensive brands and counterfeit products. There should be a clear distinction in trademark law between illegal, counterfeit goods and perfectly legal (at least with respect to trademark law) "knockoffs," in which aesthetically functional design attributes have been copied but trademarks have not. Toward that end, as a normative matter, the aesthetic features of products should not be registrable or protectable as trademarks or trade dress, regardless of whether they have secondary meaning, just as functional attributes of a utilitarian nature are not eligible …
Stolen Valor & The First Amendment: Does Trademark Infringement Law Leave Congress An Opening?, Susan Richey, John M. Greabe
Stolen Valor & The First Amendment: Does Trademark Infringement Law Leave Congress An Opening?, Susan Richey, John M. Greabe
Law Faculty Scholarship
This paper elaborates an argument the authors presented in an amicus brief filed in United States v. Alvarez, the "Stolen Valor" case. The paper contends that Congress could constitutionally protect the Congressional Medal of Honor as a collective membership mark by means of trademark infringement legislation.
Moral Rights In The U.S.: Still In Need Of A Guardian Ad Litem, Jane C. Ginsburg
Moral Rights In The U.S.: Still In Need Of A Guardian Ad Litem, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
Over ten years ago, in the pages of this Journal, I inquired whether authors’ “moral rights” had come of (digital) age in the U.S. Ever-hopeful at that time, I suggested that then-recent legislation enacted to enable the copyright law to respond to the challenges of digital media might, in addition to its principal goal of securing digital markets for works of authorship, also provide new means to protect authors’ interests in receiving attribution for their works and in safeguarding their integrity. The intervening years’ developments, however, indicate that, far from achieving their majority, U.S. authors’ moral rights remain in their …
Overcoming Babel’S Curse: Adapting The Doctrine Of Foreign Equivalents, Jonathan Skinner
Overcoming Babel’S Curse: Adapting The Doctrine Of Foreign Equivalents, Jonathan Skinner
Publications
No abstract provided.
Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors In Support Of Appellant/Cross-Appellee New Life Art, Inc. And Daniel A. Moore And Affirmance In Part, Mark Mckenna, Michael T. Sansbury
Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors In Support Of Appellant/Cross-Appellee New Life Art, Inc. And Daniel A. Moore And Affirmance In Part, Mark Mckenna, Michael T. Sansbury
Court Briefs
No. 09-16412-AA, 10-10092-A
Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. New Life Art
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, Western Division Civil Action No. CV-05-00585
The District Court properly held that New Life Art’s (“New Life”) creative works do not infringe the University of Alabama’s (“the University”) rights in the trade dress of its football uniforms, including the their crimson and white colors. First, New Life’s realistic depiction of the University’s football games is not likely to confuse consumers about the source of New Life’s goods, or as to the University’s …
"See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Hea[R] Me" (And Maybe Smell And Taste Me, Too): I Am A Trademark – A Us Perspective, Jane C. Ginsburg
"See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Hea[R] Me" (And Maybe Smell And Taste Me, Too): I Am A Trademark – A Us Perspective, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
The preceding chapter, “Between a sign and a brand,” addresses the current law in the UK and the EU regarding which signs can be a registered trademark, and the scope of protection a trademark receives. Jennifer Davis also considers the extent to which that scope does or should cover the more ineffable subject matter of “brand values.” This comment from the perspective of United States trademark law will follow a similar plan. It first will address what is (and is not) a trademark, focusing on the extensions of trademarks beyond traditional word marks and design marks (logos; trade dress [get-up]) …
Trademarks Of Privilege: Naming Rights And The Physical Public Domain, Ann Bartow
Trademarks Of Privilege: Naming Rights And The Physical Public Domain, Ann Bartow
Law Faculty Scholarship
This paper critiques the branding and labeling of the physical public domain with the names of corporations, commercial products, and individuals. It suggests that under-recognized public policy conflicts exist between the naming policies and practices of political subdivisions, trademark law, and right of publicity doctrines. It further argues that naming acts are often undemocratic and unfair, illegitimately appropriate public assets for private use, and constitute a limited form of compelled speech. It concludes by considering alternative mechanisms by which the names of public facilities could be chosen.