A Consumer Decision-Making Theory of Trademark Law

The consumer search costs theory has dominated discussion of trademark law for the last several decades. According to this theory, trademark law aims to increase consumer welfare by reducing the cost of shopping for goods or services, and it accomplishes this goal by preventing uses of a trademark that might confuse consumers about the source of the goods with which the mark is used. This conceptual frame is wrong, and it is complicit in most of trademark law’s extraordinary expansion. “Search costs” is not sufficiently precise; many types of search costs are irrelevant to consumer behavior, and even when search costs are relevant, it is not clear that consumers always want them reduced. Yet precisely because the category of search costs is so broad, and because courts’ traditional focus on consumer confusion seemed so compatible with search cost language, courts overwhelmingly have equated confusion and search costs. As a result, they have felt compelled to respond whenever a mark owner can describe the defendant’s use in confusion-based terms. But trademark law is not, and never has been, an all-purpose tool for reducing search costs or eliminating confusion. It is instead a limited intervention in the market that prevents certain kinds of deceptive acts that have certain kinds of effects. If it is to have meaningful limits, courts need to recover this sense of modesty and limit trademark law to circumstances in which the defendant’s use of a mark is likely to deceive consumers in ways that will interfere with purchasing decisions. Reframing trademark law’s purpose in this way has significant ramifications for almost every part of trademark doctrine, from a variety of theories of infringement to the likelihood of confusion analysis, defenses, and even the scope of injunctive relief. It is, to put it simply, a better view of trademark law, and one that can identify reasonable limits in an area sorely lacking limits of any kind

Proposal for a Centralized and Integrated Registry for Security Interests in Intellectual Property

As the world economy enters the twenty-first century, job and wealth creation is increasingly based on innovation and creativity that, in turn, can give rise to important intellectual property rights. For many companies and individuals these intellectual property rights may represent their most valuable assets, or in some cases, their only valuable assets. As a result, intellectual property rights increasingly play a critical the role in financing. Unlocking the job and wealth creating potential of intellectual property assets requires putting these assets into use, and that often requires a capital investment. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs and innovators lack the capital necessary to develop business and products based on their creativity and innovation and must turn to outside sources for funding. As part of the funding the providers of capital generally require collateral. This poses little problem if the collateral is in the form of real estate or tangible property. When the assets are in the form of intangible property, specifically patents, copyrights and trademarks, the creation and perfection of a security interest in the assets is significantly more uncertain and difficult. As a result of this increased uncertainty and difficulty, the availability and cost of capital for Information Age individuals and organizations is negatively affected

Newman v. Google

3rd amended complain

Can Upward Brand Extensions be an Opportunity for Marketing Managers During the Covid-19 Pandemic and Beyond?

Early COVID-19 research has guided current managerial practice by introducing more products across different product categories as consumers tried to avoid perceived health risks from food shortages, i.e. horizontal brand extensions. For example, Leon, a fast-food restaurant in the UK, introduced a new range of ready meal products. However, when the food supply stabilised, availability may no longer be a concern for consumers. Instead, job losses could be a driver of higher perceived financial risks. Meanwhile, it remains unknown whether the perceived health or financial risks play a more significant role on consumers’ consumptions. Our preliminary survey shows perceived health risks outperform perceived financial risks to positively influence purchase intention during COVID-19. We suggest such a result indicates an opportunity for marketers to consider introducing premium priced products, i.e. upward brand extensions. The risk-as�feelings and signalling theories were used to explain consumer choice under risk may adopt affective heuristic processing, using minimal cognitive efforts to evaluate products. Based on this, consumers are likely to be affected by the salient high-quality and reliable product cue of upward extension signalled by its premium price level, which may attract consumers to purchase when they have high perceived health risks associated with COVID-19. Addressing this, a series of experimental studies confirm that upward brand extensions (versus normal new product introductions) can positively moderate the positive effect between perceived health risks associated with COVID-19 and purchase intention. Such an effect can be mediated by affective heuristic information processing. The results contribute to emergent COVID-19 literature and managerial practice during the pandemic but could also inform post-pandemic thinking around vertical brand extensions

Federal Search Commission - Access, Fairness, and Accountability in the Law of Search

Should search engines be subject to the types of regulation now applied to personal data collectors, cable networks, or phone books? In this article, we make the case for some regulation of the ability of search engines to manipulate and structure their results. We demonstrate that the First Amendment, properly understood, does not prohibit such regulation. Nor will such interventions inevitably lead to the disclosure of important trade secrets. After setting forth normative foundations for evaluating search engine manipulation, we explain how neither market discipline nor technological advance is likely to stop it. Though savvy users and personalized search may constrain abusive companies to some extent, they have little chance of checking untoward behavior by the oligopolists who now dominate the search market. Against the trend of courts that would declare search results unregulable speech, this article makes a case for an ongoing conversation on search engine regulation

CPA\u27s guide to small business financing

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/1525/thumbnail.jp

Access Denied: Improper use of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to Control Information on Publicly Accessible Internet Websites

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) was originally enacted in 1984 as a criminal statute to address hacking and the growing problem of computer crime. Recently, however, in an attempt to control competition and maintain market share, a number of companies have sought to prevent entities they deem unwelcome from obtaining data on their websites. Utilizing the civil action provisions of the CFAA, these companies have surprisingly succeeded in convincing federal courts that hacking includes accessing and using the factual information a company has chosen to post on a publicly available website. Despite the fact that many of the actions brought by owners of publicly accessible websites may fall within the literal language of the CFAA, such cases were arguably never intended to be covered by the statute. Additionally, by allowing website owners to protect information that is not protectable under copyright law, the CFAA unconstitutionally overrides the delicate balance of rights between authors and the public. Such a sweeping reading of prohibited acts under the CFAA threatens the free flow of information that belongs in the public domain. As a result, the continued openness of the Internet, along with its attendant benefits, is at risk. This Article begins by briefly explaining why the factual information that website owners seek to control is not protectable under copyright law. Next, Part III of this Article examines the history and purpose of the Computer Fraud and AbuseAct. Part IV explores the way in which software robots gather information on the Internet and why companies have tried to limit their use. Part V looks at the elements of a CFAA claim, including the way companies have sought to define unauthorized access under the Act. Part VI discusses the constitutional confines within which Congress can create private property rights in information. Part VI also examines the proprietary rights of publicly accessible website owners and whether such rights should include the right to prohibit software robots from accessing the information contained on their Internet sites or alternatively the servers upon which the websites reside. Part VII suggests language that could be used to amend the CFAA to ensure its constitutionality. Additionally, Part VII reviews and evaluates alternative methods for controlling truly harmful robot behavior

Essays on Building Growth From Ideas

In my dissertation, I study the interplay between innovation and economic growth with an emphasis on the misallocation of ideas and talent. The first chapter focuses on the allocation of the innovations themselves, considering the optimal allocation of ideas across firms, and how it can be achieved via a market for ideas. This is done by first creating an operational measure of technological propinquity between firms and inventions. Using this empirical measure, new stylized facts are documented which suggest that ideas may indeed be initially misallocated across firms, but the market for patents can alleviate the initial misallocation. A quantitative model is built to perform some thought experiments which suggest that the economic growth rate can be increased by reducing the frictions in this market. The second chapter investigates why some organizations and societies are more prolific than others in coming up with radical, path-breaking innovations, and marshals evidence showing that the cause might be the openness to disruption in their culture. In order to investigate this hypothesis, it is posited that firms and societies that are more open to disruption would allow the young to rise faster in the hierarchy. This theory allows one to use the age of the top management in organizations as a proxy for the intangible concept. It is documented that many measures of radical innovations are positively correlated with openness to disruption as captured by manager age. The third chapter analyzes the link between the misallocation of talent and innovation, asking the question whether the talented people in the society are given the chance to create new innovations that enhance social welfare. This is investigated empirically using a novel approach that utilizes the power of surnames in capturing socioeconomic status persistence across time. The results show that the social allocation favors the wealthy over the talented in determining who become inventors. The rest of the chapter develops a quantitative model of allocation of talent that can replicate the observed correlation patterns, and shows that progressive bequest taxation can reduce this misallocation

Information Management and Market Engineering. Vol. II

The research program Information Management and Market Engineering focuses on the analysis and the design of electronic markets. Taking a holistic view of the conceptualization and realization of solutions, the research integrates the disciplines business administration, economics, computer science, and law. Topics of interest range from the implementation, quality assurance, and advancement of electronic markets to their integration into business processes and legal frameworks

Opening up the fuzzy front-end phase of service innovation

The “fuzzy front-end” (FFE) of innovation begins when an opportunity is first considered worthy of further ideation, exploration, and assessment and ends when a firm decides to invest in or to terminate the idea (Khurana & Rosenthal, 1998). Since such an early phase is often characterised as being highly uncertain and unstructured, scholars have suggested that uncertainty must be reduced as much as possible during the FFE to achieve success in innovation (Frishammar et al., 2011; Moenaert et al., 1995; Verworn, 2009; Verworn et al., 2008). Although openness has been proposed as crucial to innovation success (Chesbrough, 2003; Chesbrough et al., 2006), little effort has been put into studying its role in reducing uncertainty in the FFE of service innovation. To address this gap, the current study aims to examine the effect of “openness competence” within the FFE – i.e., the ability of a FFE team to explore, gather and assimilate operant resources from external sources by means of external searches and inter-organisational partnerships – on the success of service innovation. It will also identify the key dimensions of openness competence.This mixed methods study is comprised of two main phases. In the first phase, we interviewed 12 informants who participated in the FFE of 6 distinctive online service innovations. The data were analysed through a services-dominant (S-D) logic analytical lens. The case findings together with the extant literature were used to develop a formative second-order construct of openness competence, and to form a series of hypotheses concerning an “open service innovation” (OSI) model. In the second phase, a total of 122 valid survey responses were collected and analysed using a partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) technique with the aim of validating the proposed OSI model.The key findings of this study include the four dimensions of openness competence within the FFE, namely: searching capability, coordination capability, collective mind and absorptive capacity. A FFE team’s IT capability was identified as an antecedent of openness competence. Further, we found that openness competence is positively associated with the amount of market and technical uncertainty being reduced during the FFE. Contrary to our expectations, the impact of openness competence on service innovation success is direct, rather than being mediated by the degree of uncertainty reduction. These findings offer several implications for research on open innovation and on the FFE. Additionally, by identifying the key dimensions of openness competence, the current study provides guidance to front-end managers as well as presenting new areas for future research