We were delighted to host the online events for The CREATe Trade Mark Seminar Series, Summer 2025. Both talks will be held between 2pm to 3pm UK time on dates in June. Full details, including dates, abstracts and biographies, can be found below.
As previously announced, the CREATe Trade Mark Seminar Series comprises two online talks about trade mark law each term: one on trade mark history, and one on innovative methodologies in researching current trade mark law.
The Series was launched in Spring 2022, with talks from Dr Jennifer Davis (University of Cambridge) on nineteenth century trade mark history, and an interdisciplinary team from NYU – Prof. Barton Beebe, Dr Roy Germano, Prof. Christopher Jon Sprigman and Prof. Joel H. Steckel – on experimental methods.
It has since also included presentations about trade marks and empirical methods by Prof. Florent Thouvenin (University of Zurich) and Daniel Gerber (University of Basel), Dr Zhihao Zhang (University of Virginia), Prof. Ian Ayres (Yale Law School), Dr Xiyin Tang (UCLA School of Law) with commentator Prof. Paul Heald (University of Illinois School of Law), Prof. Ilanah Fhima (UCL), Dr Xiaoren Wang (CREATe Fellow and University of Dundee) with commentator Prof. Barton Beebe and Dr Emma Perot (UWI St Augustine).
The trade mark history strand has included talks by Prof. Oren Bracha (University of Texas), Prof. Dev Gangjee (University of Oxford), Jose Bellido (University of Kent) and Prof. Kathy Bowrey (University of New South Wales), Dr Barbara Lauriat (Texas Tech University School of Law), Elena Cooper (CREATe) and Prof. David Higgins (Newcastle University Business School) with commentator Prof. Alison Firth (University of Surrey), Dr Andrew Ventimiglia (Illinois State University), Prof. Michael Birnhack (Tel Aviv University) and Dr Zvi Rosen (Southern Illinois University).
Zoom links for the seminars are emailed a few days before the events to all on The CREATe Trade Mark Seminar Series mailing list. There is no need to RSVP. To join the mailing list, please contact Elena Cooper: elena.cooper@glasgow.ac.uk
SEMINAR 1: TRADE MARK HISTORY
Time and place: Thursday 19 June 2025, 2pm to 3pm, UK time, online only.
Speaker: Dr Jocelyn Bosse, Queen’s University Belfast.
Chair: Dr Elena Cooper, CREATe, University of Glasgow.
Title: The Trade Mark Roots of Plant Variety Rights.
Abstract: Plant variety rights are often treated as a minor offshoot of patents. However, this framing as “patent-like protection” can lead academics and policymakers astray. This paper explores how the historical development in the 20th century and current functioning of the plant variety rights system can be better understood through its relationship to trade mark law. The paper focuses on the role of names (or “variety denominations”) in the regulation of plant varieties and considers how a trade mark lens could provide fertile ground for repositioning plant variety rights in the debates about Indigenous rights and new genomic techniques, such as CRISPR/Cas9.
Biography: Jocelyn Bosse is Lecturer in Intellectual property Law at School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast. Jocelyn’s research examines the relationships between intellectual property rights and food, biodiversity, Indigenous rights, and the circulation of plants and knowledge. Her current research focuses on the history and politics of the US Plant Patent Act of 1930, the naming of plant varieties, and the protection of geographical indications. She holds a PhD and bachelors degrees in both law and the plant sciences from the University of Queensland, Australia.
SEMINAR 2: INNOVATIVE METHODOLOGIES IN RESEARCHING CURRENT TRADE MARK LAW
Time and place: Wednesday 25 June 2025, 2pm to 3pm UK time, online only.
Speaker: Prof. Stefan Bechtold, ETH Zurich.
Chair: Dr Xiaoren Wang, CREATe Fellow and University of Dundee.
Title: Automating Abercrombie: Machine-learning Trademark Distinctiveness.
Abstract: U.S. trademark law protects marks to enable firms to signal their products’ qualities to consumers. To qualify for protection, a mark must be able to identify and distinguish goods. US courts typically locate a mark on a “spectrum of distinctiveness”—known as the Abercrombie spectrum—that categorizes marks as fanciful, arbitrary, or suggestive, and thus as “inherently distinctive,” or as descriptive or generic, and thus as not inherently distinctive. This article explores whether locating trademarks on the Abercrombie spectrum can be automated using current natural-language processing techniques. Using about 1.5 million US trademark registrations between 2012 and 2019 as well as 2.2 million related USPTO office actions, the article presents a machine-learning model that learns semantic features of trademark applications and predicts whether a mark is inherently distinctive. Our model can predict trademark actions with 86% accuracy overall, and it can identify subsets of trademark applications where it is highly certain in its predictions of distinctiveness. Using an eXplainable AI (XAI) algorithm, we further analyze which features in trademark applications drive our model’s predictions. We then explore the practical and normative implications of our approach. On a practical level, we outline a decision-support system that could, as a “robot trademark clerk,” assist trademark experts in their determination of a trademark’s distinctiveness. Such a system could also help trademark experts understand which features of a trademark application contribute the most toward a trademark’s distinctiveness. On a theoretical level, we discuss the normative limits of the Abercrombie spectrum and propose to move beyond Abercrombie for trademarks whose distinctiveness is uncertain. We discuss how machine-learning projects in the law not only inform us about the aspects of the legal system that may be automated in the future, but also force us to tackle normative tradeoffs that may be invisible otherwise.
Biography: Stefan Bechtold is Professor of Intellectual Property and Associate Vice President IP Policy at ETH Zurich. His research interests include intellectual property, internet, privacy, telecommunications, and antitrust law, law & technology, empirical legal studies, and law & economics. He was a Visiting Professor at New York University School of Law (2014 & 2022) and the University of Haifa, and spent research visits in Amsterdam, Berkeley, Chicago, Munich, Singapore, and Stanford (2025). He is also a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, and a Fellow of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies.
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