Trademark Vigilance in the Twenty-First Century: An Update

The trademark laws impose a duty upon brand owners to be vigilant in policing their marks, lest they be subject to the defense of laches, a reduced scope of protection, or even death by genericide. Before the millennium, it was relatively manageable for brand owners to police the retail marketplace for infringements and counterfeits. The Internet changed everything. In ways unforeseen, the Internet has unleashed a tremendously damaging cataclysm upon brands—online counterfeiting. It has created a virtual pipeline directly from factories in China to the American consumer shopping from home or work. The very online platforms that make Internet shopping so convenient, and that have enabled brands to expand their sales, have exposed buyers to unwittingly purchasing fake goods which can jeopardize their health and safety as well as brand reputation. This Article updates a 1999 panel discussion titled Trademark Vigilance in the Twenty-First Century, held at Fordham Law School, and explains all the ways in which vigilance has changed since the Internet has become an inescapable feature of everyday life. It provides trademark owners with a road map for monitoring brand abuse online and solutions for taking action against infringers, counterfeiters and others who threaten to undermine brand value

Safety & Contamination Information to Retailers regarding Control of Quality and Safety in Organic Production Chains

This leaflet provides a practical overview for retailers of what is done to secure the safety and purity of 7 types of organically pro-duced foods, and what the retailers can do to support those efforts and preserve the food safety until purchase. Other leaflets for re-tailers cover authenticity and fraud or taste, freshness & nutrients, and separate leaflets aim at consumers or at production of specific commodities

The strength of lobbying and advocacy

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.CCC_2014_Report_Netherlands_strength_of_lobbying.pdf: 255 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Business and Human Rights as a Galaxy of Norms

In the last several years, there has been an increasing tendency to view the impacts of transnational business operations through the lens of human rights law. A major obstacle to holding companies accountable for the harms that they impose, however, has been the separate legal identity of corporate subsidiaries and of contractors in a company\u27s supply chain. France\u27s recently enacted duty of vigilance statute seeks to overcome this obstacle by imposing a duty on companies to identify potential serious human rights violations by their subsidiaries and by companies with which they have an “established commercial relationship.” Failure to engage in such vigilance can subject a company to liability for damages resulting from such failure. This Article situates the new French duty of vigilance within a broader set of norms that can be characterized as the Business and Human Rights Galaxy. This Galaxy consists of five rings that represent standards and expectations ranging from classic enforceable “hard law” to voluntary principles generated by private parties, multi-stakeholder initiatives, and international organizations. The provisions in these rings are related in fluid and dynamic ways and exert varying degrees of gravitational influence on one another. Thus, for instance, what are conventionally regarded as forms of hard law may draw on voluntary private standards in setting expectations for behavior, and soft law norms may be incorporated into legally enforceable contract provisions between companies and their suppliers. This Article suggests that appreciation of these dynamics can furnish guidance in interpreting the novel duty of vigilance that the new French statute establishes. In particular, the common law duty of care and the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights can illuminate the nature and scope of the duty of vigilance. At the same time, the introduction of the new French statute into the Business and Human Rights Galaxy means that it too has the potential to influence provisions in other rings of the Galaxy

Evidence-based clinical engineering : machine learning algorithms for prediction of defibrillator performance

Poorly regulated and insufficiently supervised medical devices (MDs) carry high risk of performance accuracy and safety deviations effecting the clinical accuracy and efficiency of patient diagnosis and treatments. Even with the increase of technological sophistication of devices, incidents involving defibrillator malfunction are unfortunately not rare. To address this, we have developed an automated system based on machine learning algorithms that can predict performance of defibrillators and possible performance failures of the device which can affect performance. To develop an automated system, with high accuracy, overall dataset containing safety and performance measurements data was acquired from periodical safety and performance inspections of 1221 defibrillator. These inspections were carried out in period 2015–2017 in private and public healthcare institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina by ISO 17,020 accredited laboratory. Out of overall number of samples, 974 of them were used during system development and 247 samples were used for subsequent validation of system performance. During system development, 5 different machine learning algorithms were used, and resulting systems were compared by obtained performance

Quick Connections June 30, 2000

June 30, 2000 bi-weekly newsletter published for employees of Blue Cross and Blues Shield of Florida

Networking Hospital ePrescribing: A Systemic View of Digitalization of Medicines' Use in England.

Medicine management is at the core of hospital care and digitalization of prescribing and administration of medicines is often the focus of attention of health IT programs. This may be conveyed to the public in terms of the elimination of paper-based drug charts and increased readability of doctors' prescriptions. Based on analysis of documents about hospital medicines supply and use (including systems' implementation) in the UK, in this conceptual paper electronic prescribing and administration are repositioned as only one aspect of an important wider transformation in medicine management in hospital settings, involving, for example, procurement, dispensing, auditing, waste management, research and safety vigilance. Approaching digitalization from a systemic perspective has the potential to uncover the wider implications of this transformation for patients, the organization and the wider health care system

Beyond Equal: From Same but Different to the Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence

A same-but-different dichotomy has recently been encapsulated within the ill-defined concept of “substantial equivalence”. By invoking this concept the genetically modified organism (GMO) industry has escaped the rigors of safety testing that might otherwise apply. The curious concept of “substantial equivalence” grants a presumption of safety to GMO food. This presumption has yet to be earned, and has been used to constrain labelling of both GMO and non-GMO food. It is an idea that well serves corporatism. It enables the claim of difference to secure patent protection, while upholding the contrary claim of sameness to avoid labelling and safety scrutiny. It offers the best of both worlds for corporate food entrepreneurs, and delivers the worst of both worlds to consumers. The term “substantial equivalence” has established its currency within the GMO discourse. As the opportunities for patenting food technologies expand, the GMO recruitment of this concept will likely be a dress rehearsal for the developing debates on the labelling and testing of other techno-foods - including nano-foods and clone-foods