A Sharp Stick in the Eye of Trademark Law?

By Mark McKenna Over at his interesting blog (which Mark Schultz plugged a little while back), Grant McCracken has a post discussing modern marketing practices in terms of their “roundness” or “sharpness.” He suggests that all marketing used to be…

Women and Law School

By Mark McKenna If I told you that a famous professor from a well-known law school was arguing on his/her blog that law schools should consider discounting their tuition by 1% for each year a graduate stayed in the work…

You Don’t Know Jack

By Mark McKenna The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a story about SparkNet’s attempts to enforce trademark rights in the name of a radio show format (SparkNet refers to the format of a mishmash of musical artists and styles as “Jack”). SparkNet…

My Famous Blog Post (R)

By Mark McKenna A couple of days ago I received an email from Restoration Hardware advertising its Famous Fall Lighting Sale(R). On top of my mild annoyance at yet another piece of spam, I couldn’t help but ask: “Are you…

Why I hope Google loses

By Mark McKenna The blogosphere is abuzz with discussion of the Authors Guild’s lawsuit against Google. See here, here, and here, in addition to Eric’s post here. UPDATE: this post collects the reaction of a number of commentators. I don’t…

Branded products as ingredients

By Mark McKenna Brett Frischmann tells a story about trying to buy his son a cookie with M&M’s on it and having the person working at the cookie stand insist on calling the cookies “B&B” cookies, not M&M cookies. According…

More on Shortsightedness

By Mark McKenna Guest blogger Brett Frischmann has a really good post over at madisonian.net. He argues that at least some of the problems New Orleans has experienced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are consequences of shortsightedness. I’ve been…

When a guitar is just a guitar

By Mark McKenna The 6th Circuit today released an interesting decision restricting the application of initial interest and post sale confusion doctrines, at least in the context of product configuration. Gibson Guitar Corp. has manufactured its Les Paul line of…

IP and Cognitive Psychology

By Mark McKenna William Patry has an interesting post over at his blog about how courts go about determining substantial similarity in copyright infringement actions. The post resonated with me for a couple of reasons. First, I always have great…

Roundup Not Ready

By Mark McKenna In another example of trademark enforcement on steroids, we have Monsanto’s recent demand that the author of the Bitter Greens Journal blog stop using Roundup Ready as the header for a series of blog posts. See Overlawyered…