In June, Professor Jeremy Sheff was invited to present at the University of Houston Law Center’s Institute for Intellectual Property & Information Law Annual Symposium in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His symposium paper, “An Empirical Evaluation of the Trademark Modernization Act,” reports the contents of an original dataset he constructed to analyze a new family of administrative proceedings at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It will be published in the forthcoming Symposium Issue of the Houston Law Review.

In August, Professor Sheff presented his work in progress, “A Heap of IP: Vagueness in the Delineation of Intellectual Property Rights,” at the 2024 Intellectual Property Scholars Conference at Berkeley Law School. In this paper, Professor Sheff applies the philosophical literature on vagueness to analyze recurrent concerns in intellectual property law about uncertainty concerning the scope of IP rights.

Also in August, Professor Sheff’s latest article, “Dividing Trademark Use,” was accepted for publication in the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts. An abstract of the article follows:

The trademark law of the United States places special emphasis on whether and how a trademark is used in commerce. But over the long history of the Lanham Act—including some less-than-careful drafting by Congress and some aggressive acts of interpretation by the federal courts—the concept of “use” has become complicated and in many ways confused. Two recent Supreme Court cases—Jack Daniel’s Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products LLC and Abitron Austria GmbH v. Hetronic International, Inc.—reflect and in some ways exacerbate that confusion. But the opinions in these cases also expose an interesting property of “use” in trademark law that has not been deeply examined in the caselaw or the academic literature. That property is that the use of a trademark can be divided among multiple agents with respect to a single product or service. The potential for divided use raises issues of secondary responsibility that trademark law has never comprehensively addressed. This Article catalogues the various notions of “use” in trademark law, shows how Jack Daniel’s and Abitron destabilize these notions, and applies principles of secondary responsibility to attempt to reconcile those cases with other contentious areas of trademark doctrine under the framework of divided use.