This was delivered as the Distinguished Visitor In Intellectual Property Lecture at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law on January 9, 2023.In recent years, trademark owners have increasingly been acting very similarly to those they accuse of infringement or dilution of their...

This article presents a mechanism design analysis of the optimal wholesale tariff proposed by the monopolistic manufacturer of a branded product to a monopolistic retailer if the retailer also sells a private label whose quality is unobserved by the brand manufacturer. While prior literature had...

Trademark squatting is a nightmare for brand owners and global business entities today. It is also increasing in many countries around the world. Generally, trademark squatting is an act of registering other people’s marks as their own by squatters in other countries in order to gain benefits...

Joint ownership of a trademark is, in many ways, the intellectual property equivalent of any general partnership. The General Partners shall be collectively responsible for the activities of the partnership and shall be equally empowered to act in the name of the partnership. Similarly, the...

The recent rise of the blockchain based technology of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) hasalready led to a number of lawsuits where NFTs are alleged to infringe trademarks. These caseshave generally centered around the inquiry of likelihood of confusion, as most trademark casesdo, but have also raised...

This study attempts to verify the linkages between trademark registration and firm growth based on the different stages of development and two groups of sectors by using Korean firm data. Two different paths of firm growth in Korea are identified. In the trademark-dominant group, trademarks...

Fashion upcycling offers unprecedented opportunities for the sustainable reuse of clothing: using second-hand garments as raw materials for new creations, upcyclers can transform used pieces of clothing into new fashion products that may become even more sought-after than the source material....

Trademark law protects famous marks from dilution by tarnishment, defined by statute as use likely to “harm the reputation of the famous mark.” Tarnishing uses are typically those that connect a mark with disreputable goods or topics, like sex or drugs. Mark owners ostensibly worry that...

In this paper we investigate the size of markups for nationally branded products sold in the U.S. retail grocery industry. Using scanner data from a large Midwestern supermarket chain, we compute several measures of upper and lower bounds on markup ratios for over 230 nationally branded products...

When purchasing packaged products within a supermarket, consumers choose between proprietary or private label brands. However, when purchasing fresh fruits and vegetables, non-branded produce is the dominant option—with proprietary and private label brands only recently becoming available....

Competition authorities and various digital platform regulations apply a double standard in their criticisms of Amazon's private brand programs. Amazon's private brand practices mimic those used by established retailers for decades. Comparably-sized retailers have orders-of-magnitude larger...

Through private labels, retailers typically provide their customers access to products that are cheaper than national brands. But how large (if any) are the discounts the shoppers receive for private labels relative to national brands in online grocery markets? Using the case of Walmart’s...

Traditionally, e-commerce marketplaces have enabled third-party sellers to sell to potential consumers and have earned commission from the sales. In recent years, e-commerce platforms have begun to leverage private label and sponsored advertising to generate additional revenue. This raises the...

Consumers generally rely on trademarks to navigate consumption choices. Consumers use trademarks as a convenient way to decide whether to purchase products and services in adjacent markets. Part I of this Chapter explores AI’s liberating effect on bounded rationality and consumers’ need to...

The practice of the trademark by unlawful means or illegal means by producing it in trading is known as trademark piracy. If there is a breach of trademark, the proprietor of the registered trademark can take legal action and for an unregistered trademark, the only option is passing off. The...

We create a new measure of the value of an important, but previously understudied, type of intangible asset--trademarks. We quantify the stock market reaction to the publication of almost one million individual trademarks manually matched to their corporate owners. We find that trademarks...

Entrepreneurs and larger firms are waking up to the fact that there is a viable market for recycled, repaired, and even upcycled goods. There is also an increasing desire on the consumer end for more sustainable products as well as measures to reduce landfill and other product disposal harms to...

The likelihood of confusion standard defines the scope of trademark infringement. Likelihood of confusion examines whether there is a substantial risk that consumers will be confused as to the source, identity, sponsorship, or origin of the defendants’ goods or services. This Article presents...

As retail management has become increasingly demanding, it is imperative that retailers use market orientation to promote and increase loyalty to their private labels. This can be important in efforts to differentiate themselves from their competition. The focus of this study is to understand...

This paper investigates the implications of vertical integration with private labels in the marketplace model opposed to the classic wholesale model. Differently from classic retailers, on a marketplace firms set end-consumer prices and the intermediary collects fees. When introducing a...

The main aim of this work is to analyze Premium Private Labels (PPL) in the food sector. To do so, we have obtained data from both on-line and off-line channels, analyzing social networks, specifically Twitter, and from carrying out personal surveys of customers in the sales point to check their...

We study how the introduction of private-label brands (PLs) affects retailers' prices, demand, and profits, explicitly accounting for assortment adjustments of national brands (NBs) in retail stores. Using a detailed dataset on the U.S. beef market, we find that, when PLs are added to the...

The private label products market is expanding day by day, and the decisions and applications made in this market have become important for retailers, national producers, and consumers. Consumers prefer private label products from retailers that they trust and perceive of high quality. Despite...

While innovation affects company efficiency, research into service innovation is scarce and lacks consensus. In retailing, in latest years, innovation has aroused significant interest in corporate and academic world. This research analyses retail experience innovation from the perspective of...

We investigate the impacts of a retailer's store brand entry on a national-brand manufacturer's sales decisions and firm's profitability. Under symmetric information, the manufacturer always responds by lowering the wholesale price and sales quantity and suffers when the retailer's store brand...

The paper observes and explains the important determinants which the consumers consider while making a purchase decision in select private label products category (PLPs) in North Karnataka. For this study, data was collected from 1680 respondents who considered the purchase of PLPs for their...

The research paper observes the factors which the consumers consider while buying Private Label Brands (PLBs) from organized retail stores which have their presence all over India. The study is purely based literature review w.r.t PLBs in Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) category and entails...

Grocery retailers continuously work on improving their private label (PL) strategies. Research has repeatedly investigated various aspects of PL performance, but there is currently no holistic framework of PL choice integrating supply-side and demand-side factors in a multichannel retail...

Retailers act as intermediaries between manufacturers and consumers. When retailers sell their own products alongside those of manufacturers, what is the effect on competition? Further, how does this effect hinge on market power? In this paper, I theoretically and empirically study the effect of...

The story of the ship of Theseus has long presented a puzzle over the nature of identity. Preserving the boat over time, the ancient Greeks would remove its wooden planks as they rotted and replace them with new planks. The question arose: was this still the same ship? The problem hits at an...

This article tries to enumerate and analyse all possible grounds for trademark infringements. As the dawn of the new technology sets in, we need open our horizons for new challenges. It highlights the duty of government to keep upkeep with times and ensure that there are possible remedies for...

This research explores the role of trademark litigation as a deterrent strategy against counterfeiters in markets where government trademark enforcement is weak. Litigation can convey to potential counterfeiters that a trademark-holding firm would sue upon entry. We explore this idea empirically...

This Article explores the classic harm theories of trademark infringement that don't involve sales substitution and argues that courts should recognize their empirical weakness. Despite the expansion of infringement liability based on new theories of such harm, questions about what constitutes...

We argue in this paper that retailers can strategically position store brands in product space to strengthen their bargaining position when negotiating supply terms with manufacturers of national brands. Using a bargaining framework we model a retailer's decision whether to carry an additional...

This paper examines the effect of private label sold by one of two retailers (the “chain store”) on wholesale prices in the intermediate goods market. Under sym- metric retail costs, the chain store can make the wholesale price lower than its rival (the “local store”) when the private...

We study how the introduction of private-label brands (PLs) affects retailers’ prices, demand, and profits, explicitly accounting for assortment adjustments of national brands (NBs) in retail stores. Using a detailed dataset on the U.S. beef market, we find that, when PLs are added to the...

The objective of this paper is to examine the merit in the trademark infringement lawsuit instituted by SBS Consulting Group against Alpha Exploration Co., regarding the use of “Clubhouse”. The paper also seeks to explain the dichotomy between federal trademark registration and unregistered...

May 20, 2019 witnessed the promulgation of a judgement by the United States Supreme Court which settled a circuit split created by the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and answered a question which was the subject of quandary for the American legal fraternity for more than 35 years. A...

As of 2016, 80% of the products sold in Nigeria were counterfeits and as of today, it is quite doubtful that the percentage of counterfeit and illegal goods in circulation has decreased below 50%. According to a report from Frontier Economics in 2017, which was based on an earlier report of 2016...