Are trademark owners harmed when observers on the street mistake knockoffs for the real thing? The concept of "post-sale confusion"—which has resulted in verdicts over over $300 million—is predicated on the notion that trademarks can be harmed even if no consumer is ever confused about what...

In this paper, we analyze how stand-up comedians protect their jokes using a system of social norms. Intellectual property law has never protected comedians effectively against theft. Initially, jokes were virtually in the public domain, and comedians invested little in creating new ones. In the...

Intellectual property law sorts subject matter into a variety of different regimes, each with different terms of protection and different rules of protectability, infringement, and defenses. For that sorting to be effective, IP needs principles to distinguish the subject matter of each system....

By many measures China is the world’s largest luxury goods market. China is also widely viewed as the world’s chief counterfeiter and pirate. How can authentic luxury products, with their often-stratospheric prices, have such astonishing success in China when knockoff versions are so widely...

Take a tour through the most heavily trafficked music download services and you will quickly notice a pattern. The price for most songs is the same - typically 99 cents. The most popular songs are 99 cents - take, for example, "Control Myself", from LL CoolJ's 2006 album "Todd Smith", which...

In this short commentary, we discuss our recent empirical scholarship on the vexing question of how to prove claims that a trademark has been diluted by “blurring.” We first discuss the current confusion in the federal courts over what qualifies as proof of dilution. We then report the...

Companies in a number of industries are involved in the creation of what we refer to as “design-sensitive” technologies. By this, we mean technological products, such as computer devices, high-end athletic shoes, smartphones, and cars, in which design and functional utility both play a...

In this short commentary, we reply to Hal Poret’s critique of a series of experiments on trademark dilution that we summarized in this journal back in 2019. In our view, Poret’s critique omits important findings from both our University of Chicago Law Review article ("Testing for Trademark...

"In many sectors, copying is more or less accepted as a business strategy. Products that look, taste, and sound suspiciously like 'originals' abound in upscale chain restaurants, fashion outlets, and contemporary architecture. And such industries typically regard the pervasive piracy as a spur...