Towards a New Relationship between Trade Mark Law and Psychology

Trade mark law and cognitive psychology are both concerned with establishing the mental states of consumers: in theory then we might expect these disciplines to have a close relationship, and to be engaged in ongoing dialogue. This is not the case and on further examination, real difficulties emerge, especially arising from trade mark law’s registration system. It is not simple to reconcile the goals, and the philosophical foundations, of these two disciplines. This article makes the argument that insights from psychology can play an important role in trade mark law, but for that to happen, we need to move away from the idea that insights from psychology are only useful to decide particular disputes before the courts. A better approach is to test trade mark law at a higher level of abstraction: to test trade mark law s assumptions about how consumers process information. Starting at this level could inform trade mark law, without disrupting the registration system

How important is the name in predicting false recognition for lookalike brands?

An underexploited role for psychology in trademark law is the testing of explicit or implicit judicial assumptions about consumer behavior. In this article we examine an assumption that is common across Commonwealth countries, namely, that similar packaging is unlikely to cause consumer confusion provided the brand names are dissimilar. We began by selecting branded products commonly found in supermarkets. For each existing brand we created 2 novel (fictitious) brands with highly similar packaging to the existing brand. One of these "lookalike" products had a similar name, the other a dissimilar name. Across 2 yes/no and 1 forced-choice experiments using photographs of the real and fictitious products we looked at false recognition rates. Contrary to the judicial assumption participants largely ignored the brand names when making their decisions based on memory. It was only when the pictures of the products were placed side-by-side (in the forced-choice task) that they paid the brand name any significant attention

How important is the name in predicting false recognition for lookalike brands?

An underexploited role for psychology in trademark law is the testing of explicit or implicit judicial assumptions about consumer behavior. In this article we examine an assumption that is common across Commonwealth countries, namely, that similar packaging is unlikely to cause consumer confusion provided the brand names are dissimilar. We began by selecting branded products commonly found in supermarkets. For each existing brand we created 2 novel (fictitious) brands with highly similar packaging to the existing brand. One of these "lookalike" products had a similar name, the other a dissimilar name. Across 2 yes/no and 1 forced-choice experiments using photographs of the real and fictitious products we looked at false recognition rates. Contrary to the judicial assumption participants largely ignored the brand names when making their decisions based on memory. It was only when the pictures of the products were placed side-by-side (in the forced-choice task) that they paid the brand name any significant attention

Brandname confusion: Subjective and objective measures of orthographic similarity

Determining brand name similarity is vital in areas of trademark registration and brand confusion. Students rated the orthographic (spelling) similarity of word pairs (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) and brand name pairs (Experiment 5). Similarity ratings were consistently higher when words shared beginnings rather than endings, whereas shared pronunciation of the stressed vowel had small and less consistent effects on ratings. In Experiment 3 a behavioral task confirmed the similarity of shared beginnings in lexical processing. Specifically, in a task requiring participants to decide whether 2 words presented in the clear (a probe and a later target) were the same or different, a masked prime word preceding the target shortened response latencies if it shared its initial 3 letters with the target. The ratings of students for word and brand name pairs were strongly predicted by metrics of orthographic similarity from the visual word identification literature based on the number of shared letters and their relative positions. The results indicate a potential use for orthographic metrics in brand name registration and trademark law

A framework for evaluating animals as sentinels for infectious disease surveillance

The dynamics of infectious diseases are highly variable. Host ranges, host responses to pathogens and the relationships between hosts are heterogeneous. Here, we argue that the use of animal sentinels has the potential to use this variation and enable the exploitation of a wide range of pathogen hosts for surveillance purposes. Animal sentinels may be used to address many surveillance questions, but they may currently be underused as a surveillance tool and there is a need for improved interdisciplinary collaboration and communication in order to fully explore the potential of animal sentinels. In different contexts, different animal hosts will themselves vary in their capacity to provide useful information. We describe a conceptual framework within which the characteristics of different host populations and their potential value as sentinels can be evaluated in a broad range of settings