Law Commons^™

The Mark Of A Resold Good, Yvette Joy Liebesman, Benjamin Wilson

All Faculty Scholarship

Over the past ten years, the Internet has revolutionized the resale market ― casual resellers have migrated from garage sales, swap meets, and classified ads, to eBay and Craigslist, turning hobbies into lucrative businesses. This has affected the sales of new goods and troubled manufacturers, who seek to curtail the growth of this secondary market.

Most of these on-line resales should be protected by the first-sale doctrine, a well-known defense to infringement claims that applies across patent, copyright, and trademark law. Simply stated, once a manufacturer sells a product, it may not interfere with secondary sales of that product. Yet …

Sex Exceptionalism In Intellectual Property, Jennifer E. Rothman

All Faculty Scholarship

The state regulates sexual activity through a combination of criminal and civil sanctions and the award of benefits, such as marriage and First Amendment protections, for acts and speech that conform with the state’s vision of acceptable sex. Although the penalties for non-compliance with the state’s vision of appropriate sex are less severe in intellectual property law than those, for example, in criminal or family law, IP law also signals the state’s views of sex. In this Article written for the Stanford symposium on the Adult Entertainment industry, I extend my consideration of the law’s treatment of sex after Lawrence …