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Trademark scholars widely agree that our current system for evaluating what rights a trademark owner should have over others' uses of their (or similar) marks is broken. Courts too readily find too many acts to be infringing even when they're harmless or actually useful to consumers. Trademark practitioners, meanwhile, while often quite approving of broad interpretations of trademark law, widely recognize that our trademark registration system has significant practical problems. What we haven't done is try to unite concerns over the expansion of trademark rights with concerns over the registration system and explain their relationship to each other.

Trademark scholars widely agree that our current system for evaluating what rights a trademark owner should have over others' uses of their (or similar) marks is broken. Courts too readily find too many acts to be infringing even when they're harmless or actually useful to consumers. Trademark practitioners, meanwhile, while often quite approving of broad interpretations of trademark law, widely recognize that our trademark registration system has significant practical problems. What we haven't done is try to unite concerns over the expansion of trademark rights with concerns over the registration system and explain their relationship to each other.

Trademark scholars widely agree that our current system for evaluating what rights a trademark owner should have over others' uses of their (or similar) marks is broken. Courts too readily find too many acts to be infringing even when they're harmless or actually useful to consumers. Trademark practitioners, meanwhile, while often quite approving of broad interpretations of trademark law, widely recognize that our trademark registration system has significant practical problems. What we haven't done is try to unite concerns over the expansion of trademark rights with concerns over the registration system and explain their relationship to each other.

Trademark scholars widely agree that our current system for evaluating what rights a trademark owner should have over others' uses of their (or similar) marks is broken. Courts too readily find too many acts to be infringing even when they're harmless or actually useful to consumers. Trademark practitioners, meanwhile, while often quite approving of broad interpretations of trademark law, widely recognize that our trademark registration system has significant practical problems. What we haven't done is try to unite concerns over the expansion of trademark rights with concerns over the registration system and explain their relationship to each other.

Trademark scholars widely agree that our current system for evaluating what rights a trademark owner should have over others' uses of their (or similar) marks is broken. Courts too readily find too many acts to be infringing even when they're harmless or actually useful to consumers. Trademark practitioners, meanwhile, while often quite approving of broad interpretations of trademark law, widely recognize that our trademark registration system has significant practical problems. What we haven't done is try to unite concerns over the expansion of trademark rights with concerns over the registration system and explain their relationship to each other. Registration offers some of the most challenging puzzles in trademark law. Consider: If the mark REDSKINS for a football team is disparaging and its trademark registration therefore invalid, can trademark law nonetheless protect the team against unauthorized uses of the term? This question became more than theoretical when a district court recently upheld the invalidation of the REDSKINS registrations, a ruling now on appeal and likely headed to the Supreme Court. Or suppose the PTO determines that, in the abstract, an applied-for trademark is likely to cause confusion with another previously registered mark. If the applicant decides to use the mark anyway, without a registration, should the PTO's determination bind a federal court asked to determine whether the new mark, as actually used, causes confusion with that previously registered mark? The Supreme Court just decided this issue in a way that generated large-scale uncertainty about the new relationship between registration and infringement liability. These questions, and a number of others, highlight the need for renewed attention to trademark registration as such. Registration provides opportunities to limit trademark's current structurelessness. Specifically, registration works best in a system that doesn't aim to search out and extirpate every possible instance of confusion, instead recognizing multiple reasons that we might avoid fact-intensive confusion inquiries and either ban or allow certain market behaviors. Moreover, maintaining the registration system requires the investment of substantial government and private resources, which is currently almost irrelevant at the enforcement stage. Applicants and the PTO spend much time and effort crafting the equivalent of an exquisitely detailed origami crane; rather than considering the details, courts then ask the equivalent of \"is this paper folded?\" and move on. Not only is this a waste of resources, but it also leads courts to misunderstand the proper scope of a registration. There are a number of changes, ranging from small tweaks to sweeping statutory reforms and the rejection of the Supreme Court's ahistorical conclusion that registration is a matter of factual accident rather than an important distinction between types of marks, that could improve the law to the benefit of trademark owners and nonowners alike.

A search of the United States Patent and Trademark Office's (USPTO) trademark database reveals that in 2020, a single attorney named Elizabeth Yang filed over 8,000 proposed trademarks. This number is surprising in and of itself, but the proposed marks are perhaps even more unusual. In general, companies developing new trademarks seek marks that are clear and memorable, that suggest something about the goods with which they're associated. Indeed, trademark lawyers sometimes clash with marketing experts, who want marks so descriptive of the goods they sell as to be unprotectable under trademark law. But the marks filed by Yang include LJXOAIEU for hair clips, QIANDLEE for apparel, JANRSTIC for headphones, and AEZLHJYA for jewelry. These words are not close to any in English, and the applications make clear that they have no meaning in any other language either.

This paper examines the relationship between information technology (IT) and trademarks. Using an 11-year panel data set (1987-1997) of IT capital stock, trademark holdings, and other measures for 116 Fortune 1000 manufacturing firms, we find that IT contributes to higher trademark holdings. Further, we find evidence suggesting that firms with more IT capital tend to apply for more new trademarks and retire existing trademarks more quickly, leading to a shorter trademark life cycle. Because trademarks are mainly used by firms to communicate differences among similar products to the marketplace, these results suggest that the business value of IT can be realized in greater product variety. This paper was accepted by Barrie Nault, information systems.

For decades, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has required trademark owners to comply with sundry nontrademark laws governing the sale of their trademarked goods and services. Pursuant to this lawful use requirement, the Agency has refused or even cancelled registration of thousands of marks used on everything from Schedule I controlled substances to mislabeled soap. This Article subjects the Agencys lawful use requirement to long-overdue scrutiny. It suggests that in requiring compliance with other laws for registration, the PTO has lost sight of the one statute it is supposed to administer. In the process, the Agency has overstepped the limits of its statutory authority and undermined federal trademark policy. Whether a mark owner has used its mark to sell improperly labeled soap or an illicit drug, the PTO has no mandate, and no convincing policy reason, to deny the owner the substantial benefits of registration. Simply put, the Agencys lawful use requirement has no place in trademark law.

Intellectual property's road to hell is paved with good intentions. Because liability is difficult to predict and the consequences of infringement are dire, risk-averse intellectual property users often seek a license when none is needed. Yet because the existence (vel non) of licensing markets plays a key role in determining the breadth of rights, these seemingly sensible licensing decisions eventually feed back into doctrine, as the licensing itself becomes proof that the entitlement covers the use. Over time, then, public privilege recedes and rights expand, moving intellectual property's ubiquitous gray areas into what used to be virgin territory -- where risk aversion again creates licensing markets, which causes further accretion of entitlements, which in turn pushes the gray areas even farther afield, and so on. This \"doctrinal feedback\" is not a result of changes in the positive law but is instead rooted in longstanding, widely accepted doctrine and prudent behavior on the part of everyone involved. And because feedback is so ingrained in established law and practice, its various cures tend to create more problems than they solve. In the end, however, subtle changes in doctrine's use of licensing information provide a normatively neutral solution.