Faculty Bibliography

Trademark dilution is a cause of action for interfering with the uniqueness of a trademark. For example, consumers would probably not think that "Kodak soap" was produced by the makers of Kodak cameras, but its presence in the market would diminish the uniqueness of the original Kodak mark. Trademark owners think dilution is harmful but have had difficulty explaining why. Many courts have therefore been reluctant to enforce dilution laws, even while legislatures have enacted more of them over the past half century. Courts and commentators have now begun to use psychological theories, drawing on associationist models of cognition, to explain how a trademark can be harmed by the existence of similar marks even when consumers can readily distinguish the marks from one another and thus are not confused. Though the cognitive theory of dilution is internally consistent and appeals to the authority of science, it does not rest on sufficient empirical evidence to justify its adoption. Moreover, the harms it identifies do not generally come from commercial competitors but from free speech about trademarked products. As a result, even a limited dilution law should be held unconstitutional under current First Amendment commercial-speech doctrine. In the absence of constitutional invalidation, the cognitive explanation of dilution is likely to change the law for the worse. Rather than working like fingerprint evidence--which ideally produces more evidence about already-defined crimes--psychological explanations of dilution are more like economic theories in antitrust, which changed the definition of actionable restraints of trade. Given the empirical and normative flaws in the cognitive theory, using it to fill dilution's theoretical vacuum would be a mistake.

As Jerome Barron recognized in his classic article, the First Amendment rights of speakers and audiences must be evaluated in the contexts of their relationships to larger structures. To the extent that there is a right to speak or a right to hear, who is on the other side of that right? The system of free expression is not atomized, but pervasively structured by conduits such as television broadcasters and Internet service providers (“ISPs”). This article focuses on (potentially) harmful speech as it relates to claims for greater access to those conduits. Any effective proposal for access rights should deal with the recruitment of intermediaries to police and deter unlawful speech and the many and varied ways in which individual speakers will violate existing laws.

Fair use is the province of creators, not lawyers. That is the thrust of a number of initiatives designed to make fair use salient to ordinary people in their capacities as creators. Copyright myths and legends are, of course, widespread. What this paper focuses on, however, are organized or semi-organized attempts to articulate fair use principles, usually centered on the concept of transformativeness, from the perspective of individual creators who routinely expect to criticize, comment on, or just quote existing copyrighted materials as part of their new works. Usergenerated fair use principles can be informed by case law, but they are not limited by it. Reciprocally, nonlawyers’ concepts of transformativeness could enrich legal understandings of the appropriate boundaries of fair use.

While scholarship regarding the Supreme Court's noncommercial speech doctrine has often focused on the level of protection for truthful, non-misleading commercial speech, scholars have paid little attention to the exclusion of false or misleading commercial speech from all First Amendment protection. Examining the underpinnings of the false and misleading speech exclusion illuminates the practical difficulties that abolishing the commercial speech doctrine would pose. Through a series of fact patterns in trademark and false advertising cases, this piece demonstrates that defining what is false or misleading is often debatable. If commercial speech were given First Amendment protection, consumer protection and First Amendment protection would be at odds. Rebutting the idea that constitutionally protected commercial speech could effectively address consumer abuses through fraud statues and would not be offensive to the First Amendment, the piece explains that subjecting commercial speech to First Amendment scrutiny would almost completely contract the scope of false advertising law and erode consumer protection. The piece concludes that while excluding commercial speech from constitutional protection has real costs, we are better off in a system that regulates false and misleading commercial speech without heightened First Amendment scrutiny.

Fans of popular media who write stories about their favorite characters, draw pictures of them, and edit music videos reworking the original sources occasionally stop to think about whether what they are doing is legal under copyright law. Many fans assume that these creations...

How should we think about the relationship between copyright and the First Amendment? Many answers have been proposed to that question, and this short essay does not attempt a comprehensive assessment of the debate. Rather, it examines the similarities and divergences between copyright and First Amendment principles using two points of comparison: the public forum and the public domain. A "public forum" in First Amendment law is a place held in trust by the government for use by the people, whether generally (a traditional public forum) or for specific topics (a limited public forum). By "public domain," I refer to various concepts of freedom to use expression, information and other intangible intellectual goods, rather than to real property. The public forum and the public domain are places that belong to everyone, because they belong to no one, from which people cannot be excluded on the grounds that a property owner wishes to exclude them. The history and complications of public forum doctrine offer some cautionary lessons for proponents of an expansive public domain in copyright.

By favoring sexualization over other types of critique, fair use doctrine systematically treats sex as especially oppositional and liberating, when in fact it has no monopoly on critique and no necessarily disruptive effect on a copyright owner's message. Still, adding overt sexuality to a work could challenge our ideas about the original, as well as proper sex and gender roles. Thus, this article does not argue against sexuality or transformativeness, but rather against facile acceptance of an equation between the two, particularly against the idea that other kinds of transformation deserve less fair use protection and are more likely to fall within a copyright owner's legitimate market. Gender and sexuality play varied roles in signaling criticism, defining markets, and establishing a work's place in cultural hierarchies. Fair use doctrine should pay attention to these things, not sexuality itself.

This article identifies three basic frameworks that intellectual property theorists have used to support giving authors a right to attribution: authorial high-protectionism, which is concerned with respecting the unique role of authors; copyright low-protectionism, which is concerned with increasing access to copyrighted works and wishes to substitute credit for total control; and trademark-style consumer protectionism, which is concerned with giving consumers truthful and useful information about the works they choose. I examine these rationales, and the tensions between them, and conclude that attribution rights cannot fulfill their apparent promise to unite differing visions of intellectual property. Legitimate claims for credit are simply too varied and contextual, and copyright law already too complex and reticulated, for an attribution right to be a valuable addition to copyright’s arsenal. This is so even though voluntary attribution is often a viable substitute for more expansive control of uses of copyrighted works. Fundamentally, American copyright law has enough trouble identifying owners; identifying authors is beyond its grasp. Attribution rights, especially in the absence of comprehensive author-centered reform, would only make the law more complex, not more just. I conclude by examining the role of attribution in more modest proposals to add a new fair use factor and to add protections for uses of “orphan works,” works whose owners cannot be found after a reasonable search.

Copyright lawyers talk and write a lot about the uncertainties of fair use and the deterrent effects of a clearance culture on publishers, teachers, filmmakers, and the like, but know less about the choices people make about copyright on a daily basis, especially when they are not working. Here, Tushnet examines one subcultural group that engages in a variety of practices, from pure copying and distribution of others' works to creation of new stories, art, and audiovisual works: the media-fan community. Among other things, she discusses some differences between fair use and fan practices, focused around attribution as an alternative to veto rights over uses of copyrighted works.

This short article addresses my experience using audiovisual materials from the Georgetown Intellectual Property Teaching Resources database. I use audiovisual materials extensively in class to allow students to see the subject matter of the cases rather than just reading verbal descriptions and enable them to apply the principles they read about to new, concrete examples. Many students in IP courses have special interests in music, film, or the visual arts, and the database allows me - and other teachers - to present materials that engage them. I have found that students are more willing to speak up in class when they can see or hear for themselves and can point to specific aspects of the underlying materials. I also briefly address the copyright question: should teachers worry about using digital materials in class? Fortunately, the available statutory exceptions are supportive of in-class teaching. Using images and sounds to illustrate litigated cases and hypotheticals is pedagogically valuable and legally justified.

False advertising law has largely escaped constitutional scrutiny because courts consider false or misleading commercial speech outside the protection of the First Amendment. Even moderate First Amendment protection for truthful commercial speech, however, requires some constitutional policing of the line between truth and falsity. Current enforcement of false advertising law, whether administrative, as with the FDA's regulation of drug-related speech, or judicial, as with Lanham Act suits brought by private parties, is ill-equipped to deal with First Amendment doctrine's very different concerns, rules, and presumptions. This contribution to the symposium will explore some of the ways in which the First Amendment and trademark law - a type of false advertising law - differ in approach. Unlike most treatments of the subject through a First Amendment lens, this one does not begin with the presumption that the standard First Amendment approach is superior.

In this article the author responds to James Gibson’s article Risk Aversion and Rights Accretion in Intellectual Property Law, which offers valuable insights into the extra-judicial dynamics that have contributed to the seemingly unending expansion of copyright and trademark rights over the past few decades. Her response focuses on the trademark side of that expansion. The theoretical basis for granting trademark rights is that, if consumers perceive that a mark or other symbol indicates that a single source is responsible for a product or service—whether through physical production, licensing, sponsorship, or other approval—then the law should give effect to that consumer perception. Trademark rights thus protect consumers from deception and producers from unfair competition. When it comes to expansive rights claims, trademark’s dual nature is its strength: core trademark doctrines recognize the legitimate interests of producers as limits on the licensing-based rights accretion that a pure consumer protection theory could justify.

Today's technology turns every computer - every hard drive - into a type of library. But the institutions traditionally known as libraries have been given special consideration under copyright law, even as commercial endeavors and filesharing programs have begun to emulate some of their functions. This Article explores how recent technological and legal trends are affecting public and school-affiliated libraries, which have special concerns that are not necessarily captured by an end-consumer-oriented analysis. Despite the promise that technology will empower individuals, we must recognize the crucial structural role of intermediaries that select and distribute copyrighted works. By exploring how traditional libraries are being affected by developments such as filesharing services, the iTunes Music Store, and Google's massive digitization project, this Article examines the implications of legal and technological changes that are mainly not directed at libraries, but are nonetheless vital to their continued existence.

Recent cases and scholarship have debated whether copyright law is consistent with the First Amendment. Much of the discussion has centered on copyright law's ability to suppress transformative, creative reuses of copyrighted works and on copyright's fair use doctrine as a mechanism to protect such transformative uses. This Essay argues that the increasing centrality of transformativeness to fair use has made it easier for copyright owners to control all instances of ordinary copying. Yet pure copying also serves valuable First Amendment purposes, both for audiences and, less obviously, for speakers, for whom copying often serves interests in self-expression, persuasion, and participation.

An article focusing on a copyright decision initially may appear out of place in the pages of The Trademark Reporter®. Yet Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that a parodic, transformative use of a copyrighted work, even if commercial, could qualify as a fair use, is quite significant for trademark lawyers. As a practical matter, parody cases increasingly involve copyright as well as trademark claims, so practitioners often encounter both within the same case. As a doctrinal matter, Campbell also has proved legally significant in trademark cases because the free-speech concerns underlying protection for parodies apply no matter what law is invoked against them. Campbell is thus a good illustration of the unexpected effects that Supreme Court decisions often have when the generalist Court tries its hand at the occasional intellectual property case.One of Campbell's most significant - and unsatisfying - effects has been to elevate parody as a favored form of literary or artistic comment and devalue satire. Several courts have since explicitly relied on the distinction between these two forms of humor to impose liability on those who have created the latter, even though the actual language from the Court's opinion counsels a more sensitive approach.This is a troubling trend, for at least two reasons. First, the distinction between parody and satire is too fine for courts (not generally recognized as great connoisseurs of humor) to make. Second, the parody/satire distinction simply is not responsive to the considerations that underline copyright law's fair use doctrine, including First Amendment values served by satires as well as parodies.This article sets forth the context in which the parody/satire distinction arose in Campbell, then examines how it has been applied in subsequent copyright, trademark, and right of publicity cases. Briefly stated, our review shows that factually similar copyright cases have reached wildly divergent results, which illustrates Campbell's analytical limits. Insofar as trademark law is concerned, the bias created in favor of parodies may well have made things worse by making secondary the only proper question in a trademark infringement case: whether a particular use is likely to cause consumer confusion. In recent right of publicity cases, by contrast, courts have steered away from the parody/satire distinction, but have not uniformly replaced it with a coherent analysis.

Copyright raises real and troubling free speech issues, and standard responses to those concerns are inadequate. This Article aims to put copyright in the context of other free speech doctrine. Acknowledging the link between copyright and free speech can help determine the proper contours of a copyright regime that both allows and limits property rights in expression, skewing the content of speech toward change.