New Article by Prof. Calboli Explores Tension Between Free Trade and Trademark Rights
Irene Calboli grapples with a longstanding controversy over the “first sale rule” in trademark law in her new article, “Market Integration and (the Limits of) the First Sale Rule in North American and European Trademark Law,” 51 Santa Clara L. Rev. 1241 (2011). As she explains,
Trademark law grants trademark owners the right to prevent third parties from using identical or similar signs to identify confusingly similar products in the market. Nevertheless, once a trademark owner has introduced into the market a product, or a batch of products, these rights are considered exhausted with respect to those products, and the trademark owner can no longer rely on trademark rights to control the products‘ future circulation. . . . [F]ierce disputes have characterized the application of this principle in the context of international trade with respect to the parallel imports of gray market goods—i.e., genuine (originally manufactured) products, which are imported into a country from unauthorized third party importers after their first authorized sale by trademark owners in another part of the world.
In the article, Irene considers how the “first sale” issue has been addressed in North American and European trade law. The abstract to her paper appears after the jump.