The Record

Trademark scholars love to hate the merchandising right (i.e., the use of trademark law to give trademark owners control over product markets in which the trademark is the good—e.g., a BOSTON RED SOX baseball cap). We think that trademark law should protect consumer interests. If no one thinks that sports teams manufacture their own merchandise, then there’s no possibility of source confusion.

The law governing an “individual genome” (the genetic material and information extracted from a single person) in the United States has two key shortcomings. First, it adopts an absolute conception of ownership, permitting only one entity to claim ownership over an individual genome—either the person from whom it was extracted or someone else, such as researchers and law enforcement officials.