Law Commons^™

The Use Doctrine In Trademark Law: Issues From Trade And Transborder Reputation, Srividhya Ragavan

Faculty Scholarship

Mindful of the current trend within the United States to revive the focus on the use of trademark to determine a mark’s ability to act as a source indicator, in this paper I highlight how focusing on use can create disparate results by examining the role of use when dealing with well-known marks. Hence, this paper implicates the prescriptions from the harmonized trade regime, especially trademark law. In doing so, the paper outlines larger public policy concerns that will ensue especially considering the role of the use doctrine in the context of international harmonization of protection of well-known trademarks. In …

Coronavirus, Compulsory Licensing, And Collaboration: Analyzing The 2020 Global Vaccine Response With 20/20 Hindsight, Arjun Padmanabhan

Student Scholarship

In December 2019, COVID-19, a novel strain of the SARS-2 Virus, appeared in Wuhan, China. Within a year, over ninety million people had been infected, and two million had died. Amid all the death and desolation, humanity's ingenuity and willpower emerged in history's greatest vaccine race. The global community sought to find novel ways to protect innovation and intellectual property while still collaborating to roll out a vaccine in record time. Despite the presence of compulsory licensing provisions like 28 U.S.C. § 1498 and the Bayh-Dole Act in the U.S., and the TRIPS Agreement at the international level, the journey …

Waive Ip Rights & Save Lives, Srividhya Ragavan

Faculty Scholarship

In October of 2020, when India and South Africa proposed a waiver from certain provisions of the TRIPS agreement, it was meant to increase local manufacturing capacity in these countries. The waiver was proposed as a tool to kick-start prevention, containment and treatment of COVID-19. While there is an imminent need to meet a growing supply-demand gap for all medical products, COVID-19 related products are urgently required in poorer nations to contain the pandemic. The waiver has an additional role to play in the larger trade schema. In enabling vaccination of populations across the globe, the waiver would be critical …

Intellectual Property Exhaustion And Parallel Imports Of Pharmaceuticals: A Comparative And Critical Review, Irene Calboli

Faculty Scholarship

This Chapter addresses the topic of intellectual property (IP) exhaustion in the context of the parallel trade of pharmaceuticals. These imports, which are controversial in general, are more complex with respect to pharmaceuticals, which require additional marketing and import authorizations. Nevertheless, individual countries remain free to accept these imports under the flexibility of Article 6 of the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects to Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). This Chapter reviews several national approaches—in developed, developing, and least developed countries (LDCs)—from the perspective of the exhaustion of patent rights as well as other IP rights. Through this review, it highlights …

Trademarks And The Covid-19 Pandemic: An Empirical Analysis Of Trademark Applications Including The Terms "Covid," "Coronavirus," "Quarantine," "Social Distancing," "Six Feet Apart," And "Shelter In Place", Irene Calboli

Faculty Scholarship

True to its nature as a (hopefully) once in a lifetime event, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a tsunami of trademark applications. These include the terms “COVID,” “Coronavirus,” and other medical and pandemic-management related terms. This unprecedented number of applications has been highlighted by several commentators in general terms in the past months. This Article examines these applications in detail. Notably, the Article presents the first and most complete survey of the applications filed between the onset of the pandemic and the end of 2020, which include the following terms: “COVID,” “Coronavirus,” “Quarantine,” “Social Distancing,” “Six Feet Apart,” and …

Trade Marking ‘Covid’ And ‘Coronavirus’ In The Usa: An Empirical Review, Irene Calboli

Faculty Scholarship

Famous and sensational events often lead to several entities filing trade mark applications that include terms related to these events. The most recent example of this phenomenon is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to large numbers of (largely controversial) filings worldwide.

In this article, I review the applications including the terms ‘COVID’ and ‘Coronavirus’ filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in 2020 based on the data available and recorded by the end of January 2021. These data offer significant information related to the type of products for which the applications were filed, the type of …

Introduction: Lenses, Methods, And Approaches In Intellectual Property Research, Irene Calboli, Maria Lillà Montagnani

Faculty Scholarship

The relevance of Intellectual Property (IP) Law in our society has increased dramatically over the last several years. Globalization, digitization, and the rise of post-industrial information-based industries have all contributed to a new prominence of IP Law as one of the most important factors in driving innovation and economic development. At the same time, the significant expansion of IP rules has impacted many areas of public policy such as public health, the environment, biodiversity, agriculture, and information, in an unprecedented manner. No longer relegated to a cohort of few specialized experts, IP Law is now at the front and centre …

Geographical Indications: New Perspectives And Recent Developments, Irene Calboli

Faculty Scholarship

Not even three decades ago, Geographical Indications (GIs) were a niche subject. Scholarship on the topic was rare, in particular, in the English-speaking world. Then, after the adoption of the TRIPS Agreement, the role of GIs started to become increasingly more prominent at the multilateral level, as well as part of free trade agreements' negotiations and national policies. This translated to a growing body of scholarship that included not only authors from Europe, the continent from which GIs originate, but also from other countries and the global South. In the past ten years, attention to GIs has continued to grow …

Is The Word "Consumer" Biasing Trademark Law?, Dustin Marlan

Texas A&M Law Review

Our trademark law uses the term “consumer” constantly, reflexively, and unconsciously to label the subject of its purpose—the purchasing public. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, trademark law has “a specialized mission: to help consumers identify goods and services they wish to purchase, as well as those they want to avoid.” As one leading commentator puts it, “trademarks are a property of consumers’ minds,” and “the consumer, we are led to believe, is the measure of all things in trademark law.”

Much criticism has been rightly levied against trademark law’s treatment of the consumer as passive, ignorant, and gullible. For …

Taking Access Seriously, Bj Ard

Texas A&M Law Review

Copyright is conventionally understood as serving the dual purposes of providing incentives for the creation of new works and access to the resulting works. In most analysis of copyright, however, creation takes priority. When access is considered, it is often in the context of how access relates back to the creation of new works. Largely missing is an account of the value of access on its own terms.

So what is the place of access in copyright law and policy? A set of cases dealing with copyright owners’ attempts to enjoin the markets created by new playback and distribution technologies …

The Biologics Price Competition And Innovation Act 10--A Stocktaking, Yaniv Heled

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act (BPCIA) as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). The purpose of BPCIA was to create for biologics a regime similar to that of the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act (Hatch–Waxman Act) and, in so doing, to open biologics markets to competition and, subsequently, lower the price of these expensive and increasingly important pharmaceuticals. Using original data, this Essay takes stock of the decade that has passed since the enactment of BPCIA. This Essay surveys the state of …

Modalities, Challenges, And Possibilities: An Introduction To The Pharmaceutical Innovation Symposium, Peter K. Yu

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

On October 25, 2019, the Texas A&M Journal of Property Lawand the Center for Law and Intellectual Property at Texas A&M University School of Law jointly organized the “Pharmaceutical Innovation, Patent Protection, and Regulatory Exclusivities” Symposium. Although none of the organizers and participants could predict what was to come in the next few months, there was a wide consensus that the rapid changes in the pharmaceutical landscape and our continuous struggle to strike a proper balance between proprietary protection and public access in the public health arena deserves scholarly, policy, and regulatory attention.

To help contextualize the articles included in …

Property And Intellectual Property In Vaccine Markets, Ana Santos Rutschman

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

As biopharmaceutical forms of technology, vaccines constitute one of the most important tools for the promotion and maintenance of public health. Tolstoy famously wrote that “[h]appy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Vaccine markets offer perhaps one of the most extreme embodiments of Tolstoy’s principle in the field of biopharmaceutical innovation.

Vaccines are often described as one of the most unprofitable types of biopharmaceutical goods, under-incentivized from a research and development (“R&D”) perspective, and routinely failing to attract sufficient investment from traditional funders in biopharma. In this sense, and despite the scientifically well-established …

Beyond Transparency And Accountability: Three Additional Features Algorithm Designers Should Build Into Intelligent Platforms, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

In the age of artificial intelligence, innovative businesses are eager to deploy intelligent platforms to detect and recognize patterns, predict customer choices and shape user preferences. Yet such deployment has brought along the widely documented problems of automated systems, including coding errors, corrupt data, algorithmic biases, accountability deficits and dehumanizing tendencies. In response to these problems, policymakers, commentators and consumer advocates have increasingly called on businesses seeking to ride the artificial intelligence wave to build transparency and accountability into algorithmic designs.

While acknowledging these calls for action and appreciating the benefits and urgency of building transparency and accountability into algorithmic …