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Parody As Brand, Stacey Dogan, Mark Lemley
Parody As Brand, Stacey Dogan, Mark Lemley
Faculty Scholarship
Courts have struggled with the evaluation of parody under trademark law. While many trademark courts have protected parodies, there are a surprising number of cases that hold obvious parodies illegal. The problem is particularly severe with respect to parodies that are used to brand products, a growing category. The doctrinal tools that generally protect expressive parodies often don't apply to brand parodies. Our goal in this paper is to think about what circumstances (if any) should lead courts to find parody illegal. We conclude that, despite courts’ increasing attention to speech interests in recent years, the law’s treatment of parody …
Dissemination Must Serve Authors: How The U.S. Supreme Court Erred, Wendy J. Gordon
Dissemination Must Serve Authors: How The U.S. Supreme Court Erred, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
The US Congress has enacted expansions of copyright which arguably impose high social costs and generate little incentives for authorial creativity. When the two most expansive statutes were challenged as unconstitutional, the US Supreme Court rebuffed the challenges, partly on the supposed ground that copyright law could legitimately seek to promote nonauthorial interests; apparently, Congress could enact provisions aiming to support noncreative disseminative activities such as publishing, or restoring and distributing old film stock, even if authorial incentives were not served. Such an error might have arisen because of three phenomena (in economics, history, and law, respectively) that might easily …