#IPSC18 Preview: Trademarks

The 18th Annual IP Scholars Conference is Aug. 9-10 at Berkeley Law. Monday I previewed the eighteen panels primarily related to patents and innovation, and yesterday I previewed the six panels related to copyright. There are only two trademark-focused panels, and I didn't see any trademark-focused papers on general IP panels.

• Breakout 1 – Trademarks
• Jason George & Lisa Larrimore Ouellette – Trademarks affect innovation in both positive and negative ways, and a full utilitarian analysis of trademark doctrines should consider these benefits and costs.
• Christian Helmers, Carsten Fink, Andrea Fosfuri & Amanda Myers – Well-known U.S. high-tech companies use a "submarine trademark" strategy of filing in foreign jurisdictions that don't publish applications and then filing with the USPTO with protection dating to the foreign filing.
• Daniel Hemel & Lisa Larrimore Ouellette – Effective governance of the "semantic commons" may require strategies external to trademark law.
• Breakout 2 – Trademarks
• Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan Masur & Mark McKenna – The requirement of secondary meaning for descriptive marks is a costly screen. Building on earlier work on costly screens.
• Jake Linford – Critiques of the "bad faith" prong of likelihood of confusion are misguided in light of theories about how information is transmitted.
• César Ramírez-Montes – EU trademark functionality should be expanded to cover the configuration of services.
• Amanda Levendowski [canceled] – Trademark applications reveal information about surveillance technologies.
• Lisa Ramsey [canceled] – Dilution laws and protections for inherently valuable expression (e.g., descriptive terms, shapes) should fail First Amendment scrutiny post-Tam. Building on lots of her interesting earlier work.