Law Commons^™

Charitable Trademarks, Leah Chan Grinvald

Akron Law Review

Charity is big business in the United States. In 2015, private individuals or entities donated over $350 billion, which accounted for approximately two percent of the gross domestic product in the United States. Even though this seems like big money, these donations were split among over 1.5 million organizations. And each year, the number of charitable organizations grows and therefore, the competition for public donations increases. In part to succeed in such competition, some charitable organizations have turned to branding and trademarks as a way to differentiate their entities and to encourage donations. Drawing from the for-profit branding and trademarking …

Redefining The Intended Copyright Infringer, Yvette Joy Liebesman

Akron Law Review

The contemporary copyright infringer is pretty much anyone who can get caught. Yet, who could be caught back when the Copyright Act of 1976 was enacted is just a subset of those who can be caught today—we had very different concepts about who was the intended target of an infringement action than who fits into that mold today. The advent and growth of cyberspace communication now makes it both easier to infringe and for IP owners, with very little effort, to capture infringers. The ability of individuals to both easily infringe and easily be found infringing has altered the IP …

Reconsidering Experimental Use, Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss

Akron Law Review

In the years since the Supreme Court began to narrow the scope of patentable subject matter, uncertainties in the law have had a deleterious impact on several important innovation sectors, including, in particular, the life sciences industry. There are now initiatives to expand patentable subject matter legislatively. In this article, I suggest that the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence is an outgrowth of the concern that patents on fundamental discoveries impede scientific research. To deal with that issue, any measure to expand the subject matter of patenting should be coupled with a parallel expansion of defenses to infringement liability, including the restoration …

Patent Submission Policies, Ryan T. Holte

Akron Law Review

This Article focuses on the early stage of commercialization communication when a third-party inventor owns an invention protected by a patent that a manufacturer-commercializer may profit from producing—long before any allegation of infringement or litigation. These submission-review communications by unaffiliated third parties are covered by corporate policies known as “patent submission policies.” They are the figurative “front doors” to a company for any third-party inventor, crucial to the commercialization of inventions generally. Unfortunately, patent submission policies have thus far remained unstudied in legal academic scholarship.

This Article collects and analyzes the current variations of patent submission policies adopted by the …

What's The Harm Of Trademark Infringement?, Rebecca Tushnet

Akron Law Review

Abstract

Over the course of the twentieth century, judges came to accept trademark owners’ arguments that any kind of consumer confusion over their relationship to some other producer caused them actionable harm. Changes in the law of remedies, however, have recently led some courts to question these harm stories. This Article argues for even more attention to trademark’s theories of harm; a clear-eyed look at the marketing literature, as well as the facts of particular cases, indicates that confusion about non-competing products is often harmless.