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The Myth Of Buick Aspirin: An Empirical Study Of Trademark Dilution By Product And Trade Names, Robert Brauneis, Paul J. Heald
The Myth Of Buick Aspirin: An Empirical Study Of Trademark Dilution By Product And Trade Names, Robert Brauneis, Paul J. Heald
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Trademark dilution is a highly controversial cause of action that has been the subject of hundreds of law review articles, but no significant scientific work. We analyze 60 years of telephone white pages, corporate & LLC naming data, advertisements from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, state and federal trademark databases, and all recorded dilution litigation. Our data suggest strongly that famous trademarks are frequently borrowed for use as trade names in services, but almost never as trade marks on products. Given that Congress based anti-dilution legislation on the assumption that uses like Buick Aspirin were …
Intellectual Property For Market Experimentation, Michael B. Abramowicz, John F. Duffy
Intellectual Property For Market Experimentation, Michael B. Abramowicz, John F. Duffy
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Intellectual property protects investments in the production of information, but the literature on the topic has largely neglected one type of information that intellectual property might protect: information about the market success of goods and services. A first entrant into a market often cannot prevent other firms from free-riding on information about consumer demand and market feasibility. Despite the existence of some first-mover advantages, the incentives to be the first entrant into a market may sometimes be inefficiently low, thereby giving rise to a net first-mover disadvantage and discouraging innovation. Intellectual property may counteract this inefficiency by providing market exclusivity, …
Coordination, Property & Intellectual Property: An Unconventional Approach To Anticompetitive Effects & Downstream Access, F. Scott Kieff
Coordination, Property & Intellectual Property: An Unconventional Approach To Anticompetitive Effects & Downstream Access, F. Scott Kieff
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Countless high profile cases like the recent patent litigation threatening to shut down the BlackBerry® service have long drawn sharp criticism; and in response, most of the intellectual property (IP) literature argues for the use of weaker, or liability rule, enforcement as a tool for solving the problems of anticompetitive effects and downstream access while still providing sufficient rewards to IP creators. This paper takes an unconventional approach under which rewards don't matter much, but coordination does matter a great deal. The paper shows how stronger, or property rule, enforcement facilitates the good type of coordination that increases competition and …
The Case For Registering Patents And The Law And Economics Of Present Patent-Obtaining Rules, F. Scott Kieff
The Case For Registering Patents And The Law And Economics Of Present Patent-Obtaining Rules, F. Scott Kieff
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
(Note: this is a substantially revised version of Harvard Olin Working Paper No. 415 of May 2003, SSRN Abstract ID No. 392202 (http://ssrn.com/abstract=392202) and includes more detailed discussion of issues including the DOE, willfulness and the Knorr decision, and the FTC Report on patents and antitrust.)
Critics of the patent system suggest the rules for determining patentability should be stricter, subjecting patents to more scrutiny during Patent Office examination. This Article offers a counterintuitive model system under which patent applications are registered, not examined, to elucidate a new normative view that sees present positive law rules for obtaining patents as …
The Basics Matter: At The Periphery Of Intellectual Property, F. Scott Kieff, Troy A. Paredes
The Basics Matter: At The Periphery Of Intellectual Property, F. Scott Kieff, Troy A. Paredes
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Controversies often arise at the interfaces where intellectual property ("IP") law meets other topics in law and economics, such as property law, contract law, and antitrust law. Participants in the debates over how to mediate these interfaces often view each interface as a special case deserving unique treatment under the law. The doctrines of copyright and patent misuse are cases in point: they graft select antitrust principles onto copyright or patent law, even though there is an entirely distinct body of law - antitrust law - designed to deal with the putative concerns about competition that allegedly give rise to …
The Case Against Copyright: A Comparative Institutional Analysis Of Intellectual Property Regimes, F. Scott Kieff
The Case Against Copyright: A Comparative Institutional Analysis Of Intellectual Property Regimes, F. Scott Kieff
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Contemporary debates over intellectual property ("IP") generally evidence positions that appear to line up at opposite ends of the same axis, with one side arguing for more rights for IP owners under each major regime - patent, trademark, and copyright - and the other side arguing for fewer. Approaching from what some may see as a "more" IP view, this paper offers the counterintuitive suggestion to consider abolishing one of these IP regimes - copyright, at least with respect to the entertainment industry, which represents one of that regime's most commercially significant users. This realization is in fact consistent with …
Contrived Conflicts: The Supreme Court Versus The Basics Of Intellectual Property Law, F. Scott Kieff
Contrived Conflicts: The Supreme Court Versus The Basics Of Intellectual Property Law, F. Scott Kieff
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Asked by conference organizers to consider the impact of the Supreme Court on intellectual property this millennium, this essay offers the view that the Supreme Court's intellectual property decisions by its present members generally are premised upon what may be viewed as contrived conflicts among bodies of law. Proceeding from this faulty foundation, the Court's efforts to resolve those conflicts subsequently have generated bodies of judge-made law that frustrate in important ways the basic statutory framework of intellectual property law. Examples of cases employing this problematic approach include Bonito Boats, Dastar, Warner-Jenkinson, Festo, TrafFix, and Holmes. Avoiding the contrivances not …