The New Wild West: Measuring and Proving Fame and Dilution Under the Federal Trademark Dilution Act

The passage of the Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995 (the Dilution Act or Act) has been widely celebrated, as evidenced by the number of related articles, speeches and symposia. Commentators who applauded the adoption of the Dilution Act believed that a dilution claim would now be easier to prove by trademark owners against diluters because trademark owners would not have to establish the troublesome factual issue of consumer confusion. The courts have embraced the Act, and it has already proven to be an effective weapon for trademark owners. One court has even suggested trademark owners asserting claims of dilution bear a lighter burden than that required under section 43(a) of the Lanham Act because they do not have to demonstrate competition between the owners and the diluters or a likelihood of confusion as to the source of the products or services. As three years have gone by since the Act first went into effect, it has become clear that proving dilution under the Act is not as easy as many had previously thought. Indeed, the Fourth Circuit, in Ringling Bros.--Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, Inc. v. Utah Division of Travel Development, has recently begun an open season in the Wild West of dilution land by requiring proof of actual economic harm to the famous mark\u27s selling power. The problems encountered by trademark owners attempting to pursue a dilution claim are inherent in the Act itself. The Act provides no concrete guidance on how fame and dilution should be measured or proven. This limitation has led judicial interpretation of the Act to a new Wild West where courts confront the task of measuring fame and dilution without the benefit of any criteria for making such measurements. In analyzing the Act, no court has provided a cut-off percentage for finding fame and/or dilution under either the likelihood of dilution or actual dilution standard. As a result, a wasteland of case law has developed with cases that either superficially or erroneously analyze dilution claims or avoid the dilution issue altogether by finding trademark infringement under the traditional theory of likelihood of confusion. Consequently, trademark owners who wish to assert dilution claims are faced with the harsh reality that, despite all the fanfare about the passage of the Act, getting protection under the Act is difficult, given the current inconsistent and incoherent jurisprudence addressing the measurement and proof of fame and dilution. This Article will attempt to conquer that new Wild West. Section I provides an overview of the Act, explains two traditional theories of dilution--tarnishment and blurring--and discusses the new diminishment theory of dilution recognized by courts in cases involving domain names on the Internet. Section II explores the limitations of the Act. Section III examines four authoritative cases that have addressed quantitative measurements of fame and/or dilution, and discusses the shortcomings in each case with regard to quantitative measurements. Section IV suggests a new approach to measuring and proving fame and dilution. This Article concludes with the assertion that this proposed approach would arm trademark owners with certainty in navigating the new Wild West of dilution claims analysis under the Dilution Act

Becoming or unbecoming: Contested academic identities

For some decades now, higher education has been undergoing considerable change, driven to a great extent by the marketisation of knowledge, vocationalism, managerialism and state intervention (Barnett 2000). Despite the duration of the changes it is perhaps surprising that the old problems of identity-conflict among academics have persisted, and even new academics are confronted by the old issues. This paper examines the literature of identity, including particularly its professional and organisational dimensions, before looking in detail at academic writing exploring academic identity itself. Having found the dimensions of the problem, it then suggests a number of avenues for research, which can help inform the decisions of individual academics, guide policy in higher education, and give direction to inquiries about other professions as well

Putting the person in their place: effects of physical and social contexts on identity, affiliation, and well-being

This thesis investigates how particular psychological motivations operate in different social and physical contexts. Through a series of four papers, it both extends and empirically tests some of the theoretical claims made by motivated identity construction theory (MICT, Vignoles, 2011), which proposes that people construct their identities in ways to maximise or maintain the satisfaction of identity motives for self-esteem, continuity, distinctiveness, belonging, efficacy, and meaning. Although these identity motives been found to influence identity construction at individual, relational and collective levels of self-representation (e.g. Vignoles, Regalia, Manzi, Golledge, & Scabini, 2006), Paper 1 extends this by showing not only that identification with novel groups tracks the satisfaction of identity motives over time, but also, crucially, that different motives are related to identification with different types of groups. MICT further proposes that each of the motives can be satisfied in various ways, and that particular contexts promote and emphasise certain ways over others. Paper 2 extends this theorising to the belonging motive, showing that there are different ways that people can gain feelings of belonging from their group memberships, and that this depends on the type of groups involved. Paper 3 examines the effects of the built environment on the belonging motive, showing that physical features within flats that encourage the use of common areas increase the frequency with which flatmates coincidently meet each other. This increases their feelings of belonging associated with the group, leading, in turn, to increases in well-being. Paper 4 focuses on the distinctiveness motive and, using a large cross-cultural dataset, finds support for MICT’s claims that the way the distinctiveness motive is satisfied varies according to the level of urbanisation in an individual's surrounding environment, in addition to their cultural context. The importance of incorporating social and physical contexts into psychological theories is discussed

Interdisciplinarity and research on local issues: evidence from a developing country

This paper examines the role of interdisciplinarity on research pertaining to local issues. Using Colombian publications from 1991 until 2011 in the Web of Science, we investigate the relationship between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the local orientation of the articles. We find that a higher degree of interdisciplinarity in a publication is associated with a greater emphasis on local issues. In particular, our results support the view that research that combines cognitively disparate disciplines, what we refer to as distal interdisciplinarity, is associated with more local focus of research. We discuss the policy implications of these results in the context of national research assessments targeting excellence and socio-economic impact