Anyone Interested in a Faculty Blog T-Shirt?

Look around your home and you are sure to find no shortage of cheap promotional items carrying the logo of one business or another.  In fact, I happen to have in front of me right now three pens emblazoned with the names of three different national hotel chains.  None of the hotel chains are especially trendy, so it is hard to imagine that anyone would actually pay a premium to use the pens because of the presence of the trademarks.  But some trademarks do have real cache — think Harley, Starbucks, or BMW — and there might be real money-making opportunities in selling pens, shirts, mugs, and so forth linked to those famous names.  So, you might wonder, would it be legal to start producing  and selling merchandise bearing famous names without first obtaining a license from the trademark owners?

As Irene Calboli explains in a new paper on SSRN, the answer has not been as clearly and satisfactorily worked out by the courts as you might think.  

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Does the Threat of Future Copyright Infringement Amount to Irreparable Harm?

Chief among the bundle of rights one obtains in property ownership is the right to exclude others from the use and enjoyment of that property.  This “sole and despotic dominion” that an individual commands over their property is placed in danger, of course, when the property becomes subject to the wants and needs of others.  Absent the owner’s consent (as in the case of licensing) or operation of law (as with adverse possession), a property owner would be able to bring an action for trespass for such intrusions.

A judge holding a defendant liable for trespass perhaps carries the vision of plaintiffs having their rights vindicated, but cases do not end at liability.  The judge must also determine whether further remedies beyond damages are appropriate, including whether a permanent injunction should issue.  Such is a weighty decision touches upon an extraordinary remedy: a court order that a defendant must cease and desist its illegal activity or face punishment for contempt.   That being said, in many property cases, a court order only issuing damages would effectuate a judicial licensing of the behavior.  With that result, the incentives are adjusted such that the right to exclude does not rest with the plaintiff; instead, it is determined only by the extent to which the defendant is willing and able to engage in the trespassing behavior.  As such, the courts have presumptively treated infringement of property rights as worthy of injunctive relief.

That has also been the rule in copyright infringement cases for the last few decades. 

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How Can Software Licensing Help Farmers in the Developing World?

Answer: By providing a model for licensing agreements that can protect the farmers’ intellectual property rights in the seed that they use. 

I recently posted on the problem of biopiracy — the appropriation of genetic resources from developing nations by pharmaceutical and other companies.  Similar concerns have been raised about agro-companies obtaining exclusive intellectual property rights in plant genetic resources that have been first developed and used by farmers in developing nations. 

Fortunately, 3L Ryann Beck has come up with a clever solution that involves adapting the open source licencing systems commonly used for computer software.  Under Ryann’s proposal, a nonprofit steward would obtain intellectual property rights in plant genetic materials on behalf of the farmers who developed them.  Packages of the seeds would then be labeled with a “copy-left” license that would preclude purchasers from obtaining enforceable intellectual property rights in the seeds or derivatives of the seeds. 

Ryann’s proposal is contained in a new paper on SSRN.  Her paper got a nice write-up on the IPKat blog a few days ago, and is forthcoming in the Arizona Journal of Environmental Law and Policy.  The abstract appears after the jump. 

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