The present review sets out to discuss recent developments and prospects of absorption promoters and absorption modulator systems being developed commercially by companies specialising in nasal drug ...delivery of normal small molecular weight drugs and biological drugs such as peptide and proteins. The absorption promoter systems selected for discussion in this review are those with the most promising preclinical and/or clinical data and sufficient toxicology data and/or company development efforts to warrant use in marketed products i.e. CPE-215® (cyclopenta decalactone (azone)) developed by CPEX Pharma, Intravail® (alkylsaccharides) developed by Aegis Therapeutics, ChiSysTM (chitosan) and PecSysTM (low methylated pectin) in development by Archimedes Pharma and CriticalSorbTM (polyglycol mono- and diesters of 12-hydroxystearate (70%), polyethylene glycol (30%)) developed by Critical Pharmaceuticals.
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Trademarks play an important role in protecting intangible brand assets. However, the impact of trademark rights on brand assets has received little attention in the literature. The authors examine ...the impact of trademark rights on brand assets from the perspective of appropriability—that is, the firm’s ability to benefit from innovation and creativity. To ensure causal identification, they use a natural experimental context in which U.S. Supreme Court decisions on trademark rights provide an exogenous variation in strength of trademark rights. Using a database of trademarks registered in the United States and a difference-in-difference estimation approach, the authors show that, overall, trademark applications and applications to register in other categories increase when trademark rights are strengthened and decrease when trademark rights are weakened. However, trademarking responses of brands to a change in property rights are muted for design trademarks and amplified when a firm has multiple brands. The authors discuss the theoretical, substantive, and managerial implications of the findings and provide guidance for further research.
Landes and Posner’s highly cited economics of trademark law based on search cost reduction has influenced economists, legislators, and courts for decades. Their account, however, predates consumer ...use of the Internet for search and did not anticipate the rise of firms such as Google to economy-wide power in search. Consequently, trademark law intended to help consumers find a preferred brand now also protects the means they typically use. An outdated view of trademarks as a natural and equitable right––very scrutable to STS––has led to Internet search firms owning reflexive “marks for finding other marks,” a structural advantage they have exploited through new dynamic and microtargeted forms of advertising into technoscientific rentiership. This paper revises Landes and Posner’s model to fit the case of an economy containing dominant firms with significant economy-wide search cost reduction power, adding (1) differentiation of technological elements of the original formal model and (2) analysis of the distribution and function of marks such as GOOGLE in consumer decision-making. The updated theory shows that marks granted to search firms are equivalent to generic marks in economic effect and constitute a new but unrecognized class that are functionally “super-generic.”
With the rise of internet marketing and e-commerce around the world, international and cross-border conflicts in trademark and unfair competition law have become increasingly important. In this ...groundbreaking work, Tim Dornis - who, in addition to his scholarly pursuits, has worked as an attorney, a public prosecutor, and a judge, giving him experience in both civil and common-law jurisdictions - presents the historical-comparative, doctrinal, and economic aspects of trademark and unfair competition conflicts law. The book should be read by any scholar or practitioner interested in the international aspects of intellectual property generally, and trademark and unfair competition law specifically. This title is available as Open Access.
Although recent studies have investigated trademarks in terms of economics, marketing, and management, strategic trademark management on the part of enterprises remains poorly understood, and a ...unified theoretical framework has not been established. To promote research in this area and guide enterprises’ strategic trademark management, we have performed a systematic literature review covering articles from the last 40 years and developed a theoretical framework based on three dimensions: antecedents–core mechanisms–outcomes. After defining and highlighting three activity domains: rights, licensing, and litigation—within which trademark-related strategic actions are typically undertaken, we focus on two core mechanisms: trademark strategy and strategic trademark management. Furthermore, four types of trademark strategy and five decision-making factors in trademark management are summarized, in addition to the antecedents and outcomes of strategic trademark management. Finally, according to the theoretical framework, we propose four areas of future research: trademark activity domains, trademark strategy, strategic trademark management, and enterprise performance of trademark management.
When is a design just a design, and when is it a trademark? Over the last several decades, courts have developed a clear framework for evaluating the distinctiveness of certain unconventional marks, ...especially those typically conceived of as "trade dress." The Supreme Court has drawn a line between product packaging, on the one hand, and product design, on the other. Packaging features are treated just like any other potential trademark in the sense that we protect them automatically if they are inherently distinctive, and we require evidence of secondary meaning if they aren't. Product design is different. Like color, it is incapable of being inherently distinctive and can be protected only when it has acquired secondary meaning. There's just one problem with this fundamental rule: It isn't true. Or at least, it isn't the whole truth. As we show in this article, sometimes courts and the Trademark Office don't recognize features like logos as being part of a product's design, and as a result, they ignore the categorization system and evaluate the claimed features for inherent distinctiveness. Something similar happens with certain product packaging features, except in reverse. In other words, courts are engaged in a previously unrecognized "step zero" before they classify trade dress features and apply the normal rules of distinctiveness for product packaging and product configuration. In that largely implicit step, courts and trademark examiners make their own judgments about the role of that feature, and particularly whether they believe consumers are likely to regard those features as trademarks.
While courts and the Trademark Office have been slow to articulate rules for step zero - or even to acknowledge that it exists - we show in this article that in practice they are recognizing what we call "trademark spaces": locations that consumers are likely to assume are serving as trademarks. When they apply this implicit step zero, courts and the Trademark Office frequently treat the location of a claimed feature on the product or package as an important determinant of trademark status. As we describe in detail, some locations are special. Use in those spaces goes a long way to convincing a court or trademark examiner that the design is a trademark. The recognition of trademark spaces offers a way to rationalize the step zero analysis and to begin thinking more systematically about the relationship between distinctiveness and use as a mark. Courts can and should evaluate use in a trademark space as part of the broader step zero inquiry. But they should do so explicitly and based on evidence, not instinct. Bringing step zero out into the open will help us better understand when and why consumers react to certain designs as trademarks. And it will pave the way for us to reject claims to own things that either do not or should not function as trademarks.
Federal trademark registration helps protect the hundreds of billions of dollars of brand value that trademarks can represent. Recently, interest in the failure-to function doctrine, which prevents ...registration of proposed trademarks that consumers do not perceive as marks, has surged at the appellate body of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB). This Note is the first in-depth, focused critique of the TTAB's recent failure-to-function jurisprudence. It argues that, as the TTAB currently uses it, the failure-to-function doctrine is incoherent and lacks clarity. On a more granular level, the doctrine rests on inconsistent multifactor tests whose factors the TTAB adds, subtracts, modifies, reconceptualizes, and weighs differently across cases, giving the USPTO little meaningful criteria by which to decide what marks merit registration. This inconsistency risks increasing costs for the USPTO, brands, and consumers by creating uncertainty as to what proposed trademarks the USPTO will approve. In response, this Note proposes combining failure to function with a different trademark doctrine: the doctrine of aesthetic functionality. Replacing failure to function's unwieldy multifactor inquiries with aesthetic functionality's narrow focus on competition promises to increase clarity and, in so doing, mitigate or avoid costs to the USPTO, brands, and consumers.
Between 2013-2017, around 115 EU trademark applications were rejected on morality and public order grounds. In the GCC (six Arab and Islamic countries), anecdotal evidence suggests some refusals have ...bemused foreign applicants and highlighted cultural blindspots. In this context, this work examines how three Arab Gulf states that have Islamic law as the main source of legislation and large expatriate communities, apply moral bars to trademark registration. It draws comparison with Western jurisdictions. Three main questions are explored: 1) To what extent do immoral or borderline trademarks/goods proceed to registration in conservative Islamic countries that apply trademark law in conformity with Shari’a law? 2) What reasoning is guiding decisions? 3) Can a concept of ‘harm’ improve our understanding of the power of trademarks and thus the moral thresholds that countries set?The author is an innovation and IP commercialisation professional. She acquired a passion for trademark law while completing a Master of Laws in ‘Intellectual Property and Competition Law’ in Munich, Germany. She is now pursuing a career in trademark law in the UK.
A remarkable growth in the value of trademark licencing has been recently recorded. Our paper contributes to the understanding of this under-explored phenomenon using a dataset newly released by the ...USPTO. Our study analyses the evolution of licencing activities in the U.S. during the 2003-2017 period, the characteristics of these trademarks and agreements, and certain features of the licencing parties involved. We found that licencing activities varied considerably during these years. They were usually signed between two parties only, and, on average, they involved more than one trademark. Excluding under-reporting effect, the analyses reveal that a large portion of heterogeneity in licencing activity is due to the NICE international classes associated with each trademark. Indeed, trademark licencing agreements appear to be unevenly distributed across these classes, suggesting that this activity and the way it is carried out is correlated with the market to which the licenced trademark refers.
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