Download or read book A Search Costs Theory of Limiting Doctrines in Trademark Law written by Stacey L. Dogan and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trademarks have value because they reduce consumer search costs and thus promote overall efficiency in the economy. While the search costs theory provides a compelling argument for trademark rights, it also compels an equally important - but often overlooked - set of principles for defining and limiting those rights. Certainly, trademark laws can make it easier and cheaper for consumers to locate products with desired qualities, thus making markets more competitive. Yet if carried too far, trademark law can do the opposite: it can entrench market dominance by leading firms and make it harder for competitors to crack new markets. The evolution of trademark law reflects a continual balancing act that seeks to maximize the informational value of marks while avoiding their use to suppress competitive information.Most of the literature on the search costs theory of trademark law has focused on the theory as a rationale for trademark protection. In this article, we examine its role in supporting trademark defenses. We find that some trademark defenses unambiguously lower consumer search costs and thus promote the goals of trademark law. Another group of defenses, however, involves behavior that increases consumer search costs for some individuals even as it improves economic conditions for others. We believe that these latter defenses - genericness, functionality, and abandonment - may sometimes go too far in accepting increased consumer search costs as the cost of achieving competition. Rather than the all-or-nothing approach suggested by these doctrines, we suggest that consumers would benefit from a more nuanced approach in these doctrines.

Download or read book Trademark Law and Theory written by Graeme B. Dinwoodie and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boasting an impressive list of contributors, this first edition of Trademark Law and Theory brings together a compilation of well-written and powerfully argued works by leading international academics. The book is certainly one of the most extensive and thought provoking overviews of contemporary trademark law and theory yet to be published. . . Whilst all the contributions share in common their examination of the rapidity of change within trademark systems, the editors should be commended on their generous seasoning of other cross cutting themes throughout the Handbook. . . This fascinating compendium enriches our understanding of the shape, substance, and form of trademark law and theory. . . this Handbook is perhaps a rare exception to the adage that no book can be all things to all men . Its broad sweep approach and cross cutting themes enable a range of interested parties, such as policymakers; academics in the fields of marketing, business, consumer psychology; in addition to the usual suspects; to dip in and out of the Handbook as they wish. . . a unique and erudite collection of essays concerning trademark law and theory. . . Odette Hutchinson, Communications Law Trademarks is an area of vital, practical everyday concern, and the idea of producing a volume that brings together the perspectives of 19 thoughtful and experienced legal scholars is a bold and exciting initiative. The present volume does not disappoint and the two editors are to be congratulated on orchestrating an ensemble that simultaneously informs and stimulates. The title is apt: it is truly contemporary and is highly theoretical and doctrinal in character, while the interesting choice of the word handbook suggests clearly that this is a work in progress, a snapshot at a particular time of the challenging lines of individual research that each contributor to the volume is undertaking. It is a fine addition to a larger series of research handbooks in intellectual property published by Edward Elgar under the series editorship of Jeremy Phillips. . . The editors have done a fine job in presenting this material in such a clear and coherent fashion. . . this is an excellent and rewarding volume of readings that will be of interest to anyone working in the area of trademarks, whether as an academic or as a practitioner. Indeed, for the practitioner it will be of particular value, in that it contains, and opens up, many areas of inquiry that may not always be apparent when working at the coalface of a particular problem. . . For both kinds of readers, the real value of the volume is to have so many different kinds of perspectives brought together within the space of a single volume. . . this is a handsome production: the publishers and editors are to be commended on the clarity and cleanness of the typeface and headings, the thoroughness of the index, and the accuracy of their proof reading. It has also been given a striking and evocative cover. Sam Ricketson, University of Melbourne Law School Australia, European Intellectual Property Review Trademark Law and Theory is a first-rate exploration of the issues that will dominate trademark law in the 21st century. Authors from five continents provide a truly global perspective on the present and future of trademark law. An exceptional collection of contributors and contributions. Robert Denicola, University of Nebraska, US This compendium is an excellent source of writing on all aspects of trademark law and practice by experts from Europe, the United States, South Africa, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia. It will be a stimulating read for lawyers, academics, students and policymakers alike on the present and developing trends in law and policy relating to trademarks as marketing tools and cultural artefacts. The editors deserve congratulation on their concept for the book and their judicious selection of material. David Vaver, University of Oxford, UK All students, young and older, in the burgeoni

Download or read book Research Handbook on the Law and Economics of Trademark Law written by Glynn S. Lunney Jr. and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2023-12-11 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This discerning and detailed Research Handbook examines the law of trademarks, unfair competition, and dilution from a variety of law and economics perspectives. With a comprehensive exploration of trademarks and trademark law, it provides an excellent illustration of the analytical diversity that the law and economics approach can bring to legal issues.

Download or read book Search and Persuasion in Trademark Law written by Barton Carl Beebe and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Beyond Search Costs written by Ariel Katz and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern trademark scholarship and jurisprudence view trademark law as an institution aimed at improving the amount and quality of information available in the marketplace by reducing search costs. By providing a concise and unequivocal identifier of the particular source of particular goods, trademarks facilitate the exchange between buyers and sellers, and provide producers with an incentive to maintain their goods and services at defined and persistent qualities. Working within this paradigm, this Article highlights that reducing search costs and providing incentives to maintain quality are related yet distinct functions and shows that recognizing their distinct nature enriches our understanding of trademark law. The Article first develops a distinction between two functions of trademarks: a linguistic and a trust functions. Then, the Article demonstrates how the distinction provides a matrix for evaluating the normative strength of various trademark rules and doctrines. Under this matrix, rules that promote both functions would be considered normatively strong; rules that promote neither function would be normatively weak; and rules that promote one function but not the other would be normatively ambiguous, their strength depending on the results of a closer cost-benefit analysis.

Download or read book McCarthy on Trademarks and Unfair Competition written by J. Thomas McCarthy and published by Clark Boardman Callaghan. This book was released on 1996 with total page 1186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Confusion Over Use written by Graeme B. Dinwoodie and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper tackles an intellectual property theory that many scholars regard as fundamental to future policy debates over the scope of trademark protection: the trademark use theory. We argue that trademark use theory is flawed and should be rejected. The adoption of trademark use theory has immediate practical implications for disputes about the use of trademarks in online advertising, merchandising, and product design, and has long-term consequences for other trademark generally. We critique the theory both descriptively and prescriptively. We argue that trademark use theory over-extends the search costs rationale for the trademark system, and that it unhelpfully elevates formalism over contextual analysis in trademark law rulemaking. The theory seeks determinate trademark rules in order to encourage a climate of certainty for innovators, but the concepts on which it is founded are likely to degenerate. We show that trademark use theorists ignores the multivalence of trademark law, and that adopting trademark use doctrines would result in less transparent trademark decisionmaking. Instead, we propose that trademark law retain its traditional preference for contextual analysis. We show in particular how a contextual analysis would offer an approach to trademark disputes involving online advertising that better captures the potential of trademark law to police new information markets. Our analysis contemplates individualized assessments according to common law standards, but opens up policy space for the development of limited statutory safe harbors for intermediaries such as search engines.

Download or read book Getting to Functional written by Allison Midei and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trademark law facilitates a balance between two competing rights: (1) the right of producers to identify their products so that they internalize the benefits of their established good will, and (2) the fundamental right of the public to compete through imitation. Current aesthetic functionality jurisprudence threatens to disrupt this balance. The doctrine's polarizing effects have caused some courts and commentators to favor competitors too heavily, resulting in the under protection of trademarks and confusion as to source in the market. Others favor producers to an inappropriate extent, thus inhibiting competition. Recent cases have come dangerously close to endorsing an aesthetic functionality jurisprudence that would eviscerate trademark protection for particularly successful marks. The Supreme Court has offered little guidance in this area, meaning that the lower courts continue to follow their own divergent precedents. This Article argues that aesthetic functionality should be limited to cases in which product-design trade dress or a single-color mark is at issue. Conversely, this Article argues that aesthetic functionality should be unavailable as a defense where product-packaging trade dress or a trademark is at issue. Furthermore, this Article rejects the controversial theory of defensive aesthetic functionality, arguing that it misconstrues the role of functionality as a prerequisite to trademark protection. Adherence to these guidelines for the availability of aesthetic functionality as a defense to trademark infringement would achieve the proper balance between the opposing rights of the producer and the competitor and would most effectively reduce consumer confusion, which is the core goal of trademark law.

Download or read book The Right of Publicity written by Jennifer Rothman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-07 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who controls how one’s identity is used by others? This legal question, centuries old, demands greater scrutiny in the Internet age. Jennifer Rothman uses the right of publicity—a little-known law, often wielded by celebrities—to answer that question, not just for the famous but for everyone. In challenging the conventional story of the right of publicity’s emergence, development, and justifications, Rothman shows how it transformed people into intellectual property, leading to a bizarre world in which you can lose ownership of your own identity. This shift and the right’s subsequent expansion undermine individual liberty and privacy, restrict free speech, and suppress artistic works. The Right of Publicity traces the right’s origins back to the emergence of the right of privacy in the late 1800s. The central impetus for the adoption of privacy laws was to protect people from “wrongful publicity.” This privacy-based protection was not limited to anonymous private citizens but applied to famous actors, athletes, and politicians. Beginning in the 1950s, the right transformed into a fully transferable intellectual property right, generating a host of legal disputes, from control of dead celebrities like Prince, to the use of student athletes’ images by the NCAA, to lawsuits by users of Facebook and victims of revenge porn. The right of publicity has lost its way. Rothman proposes returning the right to its origins and in the process reclaiming privacy for a public world.

Download or read book The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law written by William M. LANDES and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a fresh look at the most dynamic area of American law today, comprising the fields of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrecy, publicity rights, and misappropriation. Topics range from copyright in private letters to defensive patenting of business methods, from moral rights in the visual arts to the banking of trademarks, from the impact of the court of patent appeals to the management of Mickey Mouse. The history and political science of intellectual property law, the challenge of digitization, the many statutes and judge-made doctrines, and the interplay with antitrust principles are all examined. The treatment is both positive (oriented toward understanding the law as it is) and normative (oriented to the reform of the law). Previous analyses have tended to overlook the paradox that expanding intellectual property rights can effectively reduce the amount of new intellectual property by raising the creators' input costs. Those analyses have also failed to integrate the fields of intellectual property law. They have failed as well to integrate intellectual property law with the law of physical property, overlooking the many economic and legal-doctrinal parallels. This book demonstrates the fundamental economic rationality of intellectual property law, but is sympathetic to critics who believe that in recent decades Congress and the courts have gone too far in the creation and protection of intellectual property rights. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. The Economic Theory of Property 2. How to Think about Copyright 3. A Formal Model of Copyright 4. Basic Copyright Doctrines 5. Copyright in Unpublished Works 6. Fair Use, Parody, and Burlesque 7. The Economics of Trademark Law 8. The Optimal Duration of Copyrights and Trademarks 9. The Legal Protection of Postmodern Art 10. Moral Rights and the Visual Artists Rights Act 11. The Economics of Patent Law 12. The Patent Court: A Statistical Evaluation 13. The Economics of Trade Secrecy Law 14. Antitrust and Intellectual Property 15. The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Law Conclusion Acknowledgments Index Reviews of this book: Chicago law professor William Landes and his polymath colleague Richard Posner have produced a fascinating new book...[The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law] is a broad-ranging analysis of how intellectual property should and does work...Shakespeare's copying from Plutarch, Microsoft's incentives to hide the source code for Windows, and Andy Warhol's right to copyright a Brillo pad box as art are all analyzed, as is the question of the status of the all-bran cereal called 'All-Bran.' --Nicholas Thompson, New York Sun Reviews of this book: Landes and Posner, each widely respected in the intersection of law and economics, investigate the right mix of protection and use of intellectual property (IP)...This volume provides a broad and coherent approach to the economics and law of IP. The economics is important, understandable, and valuable. --R. A. Miller, Choice Intellectual property is the most important public policy issue that most policymakers don't yet get. It is America's most important export, and affects an increasingly wide range of social and economic life. In this extraordinary work, two of America's leading scholars in the law and economics movement test the pretensions of intellectual property law against the rationality of economics. Their conclusions will surprise advocates from both sides of this increasingly contentious debate. Their analysis will help move the debate beyond the simplistic ideas that now tend to dominate. --Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School, author of The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World An image from modern mythology depicts the day that Einstein, pondering a blackboard covered with sophisticated calculations, came to the life-defining discovery: Time = $$. Landes and Posner, in the role of that mythological Einstein, reveal at every turn how perceptions of economic efficiency pervade legal doctrine. This is a fascinating and resourceful book. Every page reveals fresh, provocative, and surprising insights into the forces that shape law. --Pierre N. Leval, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit The most important book ever written on intellectual property. --William Patry, former copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Judiciary Committee Given the immense and growing importance of intellectual property to modern economies, this book should be welcomed, even devoured, by readers who want to understand how the legal system affects the development, protection, use, and profitability of this peculiar form of property. The book is the first to view the whole landscape of the law of intellectual property from a functionalist (economic) perspective. Its examination of the principles and doctrines of patent law, copyright law, trade secret law, and trademark law is unique in scope, highly accessible, and altogether greatly rewarding. --Steven Shavell, Harvard Law School, author of Foundations of Economic Analysis of Law

Download or read book Research Handbook on Trademark Law Reform written by Graeme B. Dinwoodie and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This far-reaching Research Handbook is a follow-up to Graeme B. Dinwoodie and Mark D. Janis’s successful book Trademark Law and Theory. It examines reform of trademark law from a number of perspectives and across many jurisdictions, and contains insights from a stellar cast of trademark scholars.

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of International and Comparative Trademark Law written by Irene Calboli and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 1176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trade in goods and services has historically resisted territorial confinement, but trademark protection remains territorial, albeit within an increasingly important framework of multilateral treaties. Trademark law therefore demands that practitioners, policy-makers and academics understand principles of international and comparative law. This handbook assists in that endeavour, with chapters describing and critically analyzing international and regional frameworks, and providing comparative perspectives on the substantive issues in trademark law and related fields, such as geographic indications, advertising law, and domain names. Chapters contrast common law and civil law approaches while focusing on the US and EU trademark systems in light of the role these systems have played in the development of trademark laws. Additionally, this handbook covers other jurisdictions, both common law and civil law, on the Asia-Pacific, African, and South American continents. This work should be read by anyone seeking a better understanding of trademark law around the world.

Download or read book U S Trademark Law written by and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Misappropriation of Trademark written by David W. Barnes and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dominant view of misappropriation doctrine fits trademark law poorly. It is at odds with contemporary theory and the reasons for protecting intellectual property. A more nuanced view of the Supreme Court's germinal misappropriation case leads to a misappropriation doctrine consistent with both externality theory and public goods theory. IP theory and misappropriation doctrine then lead to rules reflecting a balance between incentive creation and free access. Applying this nuanced interpretation to the issue of Internet initial interest confusion suggests that keyword advertising promotes competition and reduces search costs more than it interferes with incentives to engage in trademarking activity.

Download or read book Research Handbook on the Economics of Intellectual Property Law written by Ben Depoorter and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 1504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both law and economics and intellectual property law have expanded dramatically in tandem over recent decades. This field-defining two-volume Handbook, featuring the leading legal, empirical, and law and economics scholars studying intellectual property rights, provides wide-ranging and in-depth analysis both of the economic theory underpinning intellectual property law, and the use of analytical methods to study it.

Download or read book Towards a More Coherent Doctrine of Trademark Genericism and Functionality written by Sandra L. Rierson and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The doctrines of trademark genericism and functionality serve similar functions under the Lanham Act and the common law of unfair competition. Genericism, in the context of word marks, and functionality, for trade dress, bar trademark registration under the Lanham Act and, both under the Act and at common law, render a trademark unprotectable and invalid. In the word mark context, genericism stands for the proposition that certain parts of our vocabulary cannot be cordoned off as trademarks; all competitors must be able to use words that consumers understand to identify the goods or services that they are selling. Functionality likewise demands that certain aspects of product design cannot be legally protected as trade dress, as to do so would potentially limit competitors' ability to make products that work as well, at the same price. The core concern, for both doctrines, is or should be the preservation of free and fair market competition. The types of trademarks typically at issue when making genericism and functionality determinations - word marks that are, at best, descriptive, or product design functioning as trade dress - are correctly described as weak. The genericism and functionality doctrines therefore play a critical role in marking the boundaries of trademark law. To properly draw those lines, decision makers need to correctly define and understand the theory underlying both doctrines.Both genericism and functionality, in their practical interpretation and purpose, should more clearly reflect the core principle of protecting fair competition. In particular, the concept of viable, competitive alternatives - either in the form of words or alternative designs - should play an enhanced role in determining whether an erstwhile trademark is generic or functional. The various tests for genericism and functionality currently employed by the courts often attempt to draw artificial distinctions among categories of words or product features that may confound business owners (and their lawyers) and divert the focus of the courts' inquiry in such cases away from the core value at the heart of both doctrines: preserving fair competition.

Download or read book Trademark and Deceptive Advertising Surveys written by Shari Seidman Diamond and published by American Bar Association. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the issues that trademark surveys address, this book offers practical tools for recognizing and appreciating good survey methodology and distinguishing valuable evidence. The authors examine design and analysis topics relevant when presenting, defending, or critiquing a survey. Combining theory and practice in one resource, it features actual and hypothetical cases while discussing how the courts have addressed these issues. Current and authoritative, this book provides strategic guidance on how to identify important issues, understand options, and the best way to handle them.