Law Commons^™

Trademark Owner As Adverse Possessor, Jake Linford

Jake Linford

There is an ongoing debate over whether or not a trademark is “property,” and what type of rights a trademark properly secures. Some scholars assert that rules and justifications developed to handle rights in real property are generally a poor fit for intellectual property regimes, and for trademark protection in particular. Others respond that a unified theory of property should be able to account for both real and intellectual property. This article takes the middle course and approaches the issue by mining the analogy between the acquisition of trademark protection and the doctrine of adverse possession.

Courts and scholars have …