Law Commons^™

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 …

Confused About Copyright?, Sara Anne Hook

Graduate Scholarship and Professional Work

No abstract provided.

Questions Of Intellectual Property And Fundamental Values In The Digital Age, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Today's intellectual property debates, in both law and the larger society, are a bellwether of changing justice needs in the twenty-first century. As the digital age democratizes technological opportunities, it brings intellectual property law into mainstream everyday culture. This generates debates about the relationship between the constitutional interest in "the progress of science and useful arts" and other fundamental values, such as equality, privacy, and distributive justice. These values, which were not explicitly part of intellectual property regimes in prior eras, are especially challenged in today's internet world.

The article (which was presented as the annual Nies Lecture in April …

Hard Truths About Soft Ip, Amanda Levendowski

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

People routinely refer to copyright and trademark as “soft IP” to distinguish these practices from another area of intellectual property: patent. But the term reflects implicit biases against copyright and trademark doctrine and practioners. “Soft IP” implies that patent law alone is hard, even though patents are no more physically, metaphorically or intellectually hard than copyrights and trademarks. Despite stereotypes to the contrary, patents are not necessarily more practically hard: while the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office requires technical training for patent prosecutors, which excludes many women and people of color, no such experience is necessary for most patent litigators …

Trademarks, Nfts, And The Law Of The Metaverse, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This Article discusses the early encounters of NFTs, trademarks, and the legal system. This work will examine the areas where NFT creators are getting into or are likely to get into trouble with the law and policy of trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and the related legal causes of action of false endorsement and false designation of origin. United States law is being applied in lawsuits that already are being adjudicated in the real world concerning subject matter that exists only in cyberspace, the pre-cursor to the metaverse.