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When is a design just a design, and when is it a trademark? Over the last several decades, courts have developed a clear framework for evaluating the distinctiveness of certain unconventional marks, especially those typically conceived of as \"trade dress.\" The Supreme Court has drawn a line between product packaging, on the one hand, and product design, on the other. Packaging features are treated just like any other potential trademark in the sense that we protect them automatically if they are inherently distinctive, and we require evidence of secondary meaning if they aren't. Product design is different. Like color, it is incapable of being inherently distinctive and can be protected only when it has acquired secondary meaning. There's just one problem with this fundamental rule: It isn't true. Or at least, it isn't the whole truth. As we show in this article, sometimes courts and the Trademark Office don't recognize features like logos as being part of a product's design, and as a result, they ignore the categorization system and evaluate the claimed features for inherent distinctiveness. Something similar happens with certain product packaging features, except in reverse. In other words, courts are engaged in a previously unrecognized \"step zero\" before they classify trade dress features and apply the normal rules of distinctiveness for product packaging and product configuration. In that largely implicit step, courts and trademark examiners make their own judgments about the role of that feature, and particularly whether they believe consumers are likely to regard those features as trademarks. While courts and the Trademark Office have been slow to articulate rules for step zero - or even to acknowledge that it exists - we show in this article that in practice they are recognizing what we call \"trademark spaces\": locations that consumers are likely to assume are serving as trademarks. When they apply this implicit step zero, courts and the Trademark Office frequently treat the location of a claimed feature on the product or package as an important determinant of trademark status. As we describe in detail, some locations are special. Use in those spaces goes a long way to convincing a court or trademark examiner that the design is a trademark. The recognition of trademark spaces offers a way to rationalize the step zero analysis and to begin thinking more systematically about the relationship between distinctiveness and use as a mark. Courts can and should evaluate use in a trademark space as part of the broader step zero inquiry. But they should do so explicitly and based on evidence, not instinct. Bringing step zero out into the open will help us better understand when and why consumers react to certain designs as trademarks. And it will pave the way for us to reject claims to own things that either do not or should not function as trademarks.

United States trademark law requires that a mark be used in commerce for it to qualify for registration at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). Applicants prove that they have met the use requirement by submitting to the PTO photographic specimens of their use of the mark in commerce. This Piece reports the results of new empirical work showing that an appreciable number of U.S. trademark applications originating in China include fraudulent specimens of use. In particular, with respect to use-based applications originating in China that were filed at the PTO in 2017 solely for apparel goods, we estimate that 66.9% of such applications included fraudulent specimens. Yet 59.8% of these fraudulent applications proceeded to publication, and 38.9% then proceeded to registration. If these applications are representative of the overall population of Chinese-origin applications in that year, then approximately 14.0% of all such use-based applications filed with the PTO in 2017 were fraudulent. Fraudulent registrations worsen the problems of trademark depletion and clutter, undermine the integrity of the trademark register, and hurt legitimate businesses that may benefit from using these marks. We therefore recommend legislative action to make it easier for third parties and the PTO to cull these marks from the register and systematic improvement by the PTO to ensure that applications with fraudulent specimens are not registered in the first instance.

Over the past decade, the uncertainty of fashion's status as protectable intellectual property has generated enormous controversy. It is no wonder: in 2011, apparel sales in the United States amounted to almost two hundred billion dollars; handbag sales alone accounted for eight billion dollars that year and are continuing to balloon at ten percent annually. This trend is also global. Fashion has become one of the largest and most dynamic industries in the world. Global fashion revenue totals one trillion dollars per year, representing four percent of global GDP. Unsurprisingly, then, the question of intellectual property protection for fashion design has commanded attention from designers, litigators, policymakers, and consumers. Nevertheless, growth in the industry's economic importance and in the ease of pirating fashion designs have both outpaced legal change.

In 1993, as part of the negotiations leading to creation of the World Trade Organization, the United States and other industrialized countries agreed to end the long-standing global system of country-by-country quotas regulating the $495 billion international trade in textiles and apparel. The elimination of the quota system, scheduled for January 1, 2005, was expected to benefit textile and apparel industries in a broad range of developing countries. In the intervening decade, however, China has developed an extremely powerful position as a textile and apparel producer, gaining market share at the expense of other producers. Some analysts predict that China could capture from 50 to 70 percent of the U.S. market after quotas end, shouldering aside producers in countries such as Cambodia, Honduras, and Sri Lanka.

[...] Volkswagen challenged the CIT's determination that it failed to state a claim with respect to the defects discovered after the expiration of the protest period. Among other things, this list includes certain baby products, kites containing uninsulated metal, sneezing powder, and urea formaldehydebased thermal insulation. [...] the proposed legislation prohibits the import, manufacture, advertisement, or sale of any item considered to pose a danger to human health or safety.

In light of recent trends of corporate downsizing and debates over corporate responsibility, Sanford Jacoby offers a timely, comprehensive history of twentieth-century welfare capitalism, that is, the history of nonunion corporations that looked after the economic security of employees. Building on three fascinating case studies of \"modern manors\" (Eastman Kodak, Sears, and TRW), Jacoby argues that welfare capitalism did not expire during the Depression, as traditionally thought. Rather it adapted to the challenges of the 1930s and became a powerful, though overlooked, factor in the history of the welfare state, the labor movement, and the corporation. \"Fringe\" benefits, new forms of employee participation, and sophisticated anti-union policies are just some of the outgrowths of welfare capitalism that provided a model for contemporary employers seeking to create productive nonunion workplaces.

The existing child labor problem in Bangladesh is analyzed and Harkin's Bill is evaluated in light of the socioeconomic reality of the country. The viability of schooling programs is postulated in the Memorandum of Understanding are also examined. Harking's Bill (The Child Labor Deterrence Act 1993) was presented in the US Senate by Senator Tom Harkin. Harkin's Bill proposes a ban on imports to the US from countries that use child labor at any stage of production of these commodities. Bangladesh has been the focus of much of this discussion, where the issue is the participation of children in the export garment industry.