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Intellectual Property Law

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

2014

Trademark law

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

Jurisdictional Limits Of In Rem Proceedings Against Domain Names, Michael Xun Liu Jan 2014

Jurisdictional Limits Of In Rem Proceedings Against Domain Names, Michael Xun Liu

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

In 1999, Congress passed the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) to combat “cybersquatters” who profited by registering domain names that were confusingly similar to established trademarks. Under the ACPA, trademark owners have a specific cause of action against domain name registrants accused of cybersquatting. Moreover, the law gives U.S. courts in rem jurisdiction over trademark infringing domain names registered to parties that are not subject to personal jurisdiction. Over the past decade, proceeding in rem against domain names has proven to be an effective strategy for trademark owners. While many companies have used the ACPA against cybersquatters, others have relied …


Dilution At The Patent And Trademark Office, Jeremy N. Sheff Jan 2014

Dilution At The Patent And Trademark Office, Jeremy N. Sheff

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

This Article undertakes the first systematic investigation of trademark dilution in registration practice before the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). The Article consists of three distinct descriptive empirical analyses. In the first, I present a new hand-coded dataset of all 453 Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) dispositions of dilution claims through June 30, 2014, and report that dilution has been necessary to the PTO’s refusal of exactly three registrations in over a decade. In the second part, I apply algorithmic coding of the recently released PTO Casefiles Dataset to demonstrate that concurrent registration of identical marks to different …


A Material World: Using Trademark Law To Override Copyright's First Sale Rule For Imported Copies, Mary Lafrance Jan 2014

A Material World: Using Trademark Law To Override Copyright's First Sale Rule For Imported Copies, Mary Lafrance

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

When the Supreme Court held that the first sale rule of copyright law permits the unauthorized importation and domestic sale of lawfully made copies of copyrighted works, regardless of where those copies were made, copyright owners lost much of their ability to engage in territorial price discrimination. Publishers, film and record producers, and software and videogame makers could no longer use copyright law to prevent the importation and domestic resale of gray market copies, and therefore could no longer protect their domestic distributors against competition from cheaper imported copies. However, many of these copyright owners can take advantage of a …