Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: A Need for China to Further Amend its 2013 Trademark Law in Order to Prevent Trademark Squatting

This Note examines the effect that China’s 2013 Trademark Law amendments have had on curtailing the trademark squatting problem that plagues foreign corporations and individuals attempting to register a trademark in China. Trademarks play a crucial role in establishing brand recognition in an individual or a company’s product. Given China’s large and growing population of potential consumers, obtaining a Chinese trademark is especially valuable. Chinese trademark squatters, however, make this difficult for foreign corporations and individuals by filing for registration in China once the mark gains popularity, not intending to use the trademark in commerce, but to hold it as ransom until a fee is paid. This Note will provide a historical overview of China’s Trademark Law, discussing past amendments leading up to China’s 2013 amendments, which took effect on May 1, 2014. Then, this Note will acknowledge the positive effects of China’s 2013 amendments, specifically Article 7’s good faith principle, while arguing that more reform is needed to clarify what constitutes good faith and equalize the appeals process under Article 35, which grants legal rights in a trademark before the appeals process is complete. Finally, this Note will propose adopting the definition and examples of bad faith from Australia’s Trade Mark Amendment Act, while detailing how China can create transparency and grant more rights to foreign corporations and individuals during the appeals process

Much Ado About the TPP’s Effect on Pharmaceuticals

Ocular antigens are sequestered behind the blood-retina barrier and the ocular environment protects ocular tissues from autoimmune attack. The signals required to activate autoreactive T cells and allow them to cause disease in the eye remain in part unclear. In particular, the consequences of peripheral presentation of ocular antigens are not fully understood. We examined peripheral expression and presentation of ocular neo-self-antigen in transgenic mice expressing hen egg lysozyme (HEL) under a retina-specific promoter. High levels of HEL were expressed in the eye compared to low expression throughout the lymphoid system. Adoptively transferred naïve HEL-specific CD4+ T cells proliferated in the eye draining lymph nodes, but did not induce uveitis. By contrast, systemic infection with a murine cytomegalovirus (MCMV) engineered to express HEL induced extensive proliferation of transferred naïve CD4+ T cells, and significant uveoretinitis. In this model, wild-type MCMV, lacking HEL, did not induce overt uveitis, suggesting that disease is mediated by antigen-specific peripherally activated CD4+ T cells that infiltrate the retina. Our results demonstrate that retinal antigen is presented to T cells in the periphery under physiological conditions. However, when the same antigen is presented during viral infection, antigen-specific T cells access the retina and autoimmune uveitis ensues

The Accidental Innovation Policymakers

Health care policymakers in the United States, particularly at the federal level, have recently considered a range of proposals that would lower prices for prescription drugs. The pharmaceutical industry and many politicians have argued that these proposals would harm innovation incentives, resulting in fewer new drugs coming to market in the future. This Article identifies and explores a key problem with this argument: that it is typically deployed both accidentally and asymmetrically in nature. Specifically, this Article considers previous changes to health laws that had the impact of increasing innovation incentives by providing large new subsidies to pharmaceutical companies—chiefly the creation of Medicare Part D and the passage of the Affordable Care Act—but where policymakers appear not to have analyzed these innovation-related aspects of the new laws. By contrasting these laws with others in which policymakers explicitly centered the innovation-related impacts of their actions, such as the Hatch-Waxman Act and the Orphan Drug Act, this Article suggests that policymakers may in some cases be making innovation policy “by accident,” without knowledge of their likely results. These innovation arguments are also deployed asymmetrically by interested stakeholders, creating the potential for unbalanced policymaking over time. This Article further analyzes the implications of this accidental, asymmetric policymaking for innovation law and policy

Double Standards: An Empirical Study of Patent and Trademark Discipline

Our legal system is built on the foundation that lawyers have a number of coexisting and sometimes conflicting duties—to their clients, to others who might be affected by their practice, and to the effective and equitable administration of justice. Although most lawyers fulfill these duties ethically, invariably some fail to live up to these expectations. For this reason, all states have created disciplinary authorities to regulate and sanction lawyer misconduct. Interestingly, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is one of the few agencies to have developed its own disciplinary system for policing the conduct of those who practice before it. The USPTO’s need to regulate the conduct of trademark attorneys and patent practitioners is largely due to the critical role that these professionals play in the provision of intellectual property rights. Yet the existence of this analogous disciplinary system is little more than window dressing if the USPTO does not leverage its authority to ensure that those it regulates conform their conduct to the ethical standards of the profession. Through innovative empirical methods marshalling data over sixteen years from disciplinary authorities throughout the country, this Article shows that the USPTO is not only failing to discipline bad actors with regularity, but also overlooking the types of misconduct that threaten to undercut the provision of intellectual property rights that are in the public interest