We were delighted to host the events for The CREATe Trade Mark Seminar Series, Autumn 2025. Both talks will be held online in November. 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, Dr Emma Perot (UWI St Augustine) and Prof. Stefan Bechtold (ETH Zurich).
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), Dr Zvi Rosen (Southern Illinois University) and Dr Jocelyn Bosse (Queen’s University Belfast).
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
To propose a paper for a future seminar in the Series, please email the convenors: Elena Cooper (trade mark history) and Xiaoren Wang (innovative methods for researching current trade mark law).
SEMINAR 1: INNOVATIVE METHODOLOGIES FOR RESEARCHING CURRENT TRADE MARK LAW
Time and place: Wednesday 5 November 2025, 4pm to 5pm, UK time, online only.
Speaker: Prof. Sonia K. Katyal, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.
Chair: Dr Xiaoren Wang, CREATe Fellow and University of Dundee.
Title: Trade Mark Search, Artificial Intelligence and the Role of the Private Sector.
Abstract: Almost every industry today is confronting the potential role that artificial intelligence and machine learning can play in its future. While there are many, many studies on the role of AI in marketing to the consumer, there is less discussion of the role of AI in creation and selecting a trade mark that is both distinctive, recognisable and meaningful to the average consumer. We begin, mainly, by proposing, as a general matter, that AI should be of interest to anyone studying trade marks and the role that they play in economic decision-making. By running a series of empirical experiments regarding search, we show how comparative work can help us to assess the efficacy of various trade mark search engines, many of which draw on a variety of machine learning methods. Traditional approaches to trade marks, spearheaded by economic approaches, have focused almost exclusively on consumer-based, demand side considerations regarding search. Yet, as we show in this paper, these approaches are incomplete because they fail to take into account the substantial costs that are also faced by not just consumers, but trade mark applicants as well.
In the end, as we show, machine learning techniques will have a transformative effect on the application and interpretation of foundational trade mark doctrines, producing significant implications for the trade mark ecosystem. In an age where artificial intelligence will increasingly govern the process of trade mark selection, we argue that the classic division between consumers and trade mark owners is perhaps deserving of an updated, supply-side framework. As we argue, a new framework is needed, one that reflects that putative trade mark owners, too, are also consumers in the trade mark selection ecosystem, and that this insight has transformative potential for encouraging both innovation and efficiency.
Biography: Sonia Katyal is the Associate Dean, Faculty Development and Research Co-Director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology Roger J. Traynor Distinguished Professor of Law. Professor Katyal’s current projects focus on artificial intelligence and intellectual property; trade mark law, branding and advertising; the intersection between the right to information and human rights; and a variety of projects on the intersection between art law, cultural heritage and new media. Professor Katyal has various publications in the California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Michigan Law Review (with Ilona Turner), Berkeley Technology Law Journal (with Aniket Kesari), etc, and has also been cited by the US Supreme Court. Professor Katyal has won several awards for her work, including an honourable mention in the American Association of Law Schools Scholarly Papers Competition, a Yale Cybercrime Award, and is a three-time winner of a Dukeminier Award from the Williams Project at UCLA for her writing on gender and sexuality. During the Obama administration, Katyal was selected by U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker to be part of the inaugural U.S. Commerce Department’s Digital Economy Board of Advisors.
SEMINAR 2: TRADE MARK HISTORY
Time and place: Friday 14 November 2025, 2pm to 3pm UK time, online only.
Speakers: Dr Elena Cooper, CREATe and Prof. David Higgins, University of Newcastle, with commentator Dr Jennifer Davis, University of Cambridge.
Chair: Dr Xiaoren Wang, CREATe Fellow and University of Dundee.
Title: Hallmarks as ‘Trade Marks’ in the English Watch Making Industry c. 1880-1914: Pre-modern Regulation in Modern Times.
Abstract: This paper analyses a single strand of the history of British trade mark law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during which both modern trade mark law and modern intellectual property law more generally, emerged. We view this important period in the legal history of trade marks through the prism of a particular industry: watch making in England. Intertwining insights from legal history and business history, we present a novel counter example to the usual narrative of the law’s modernisation during this period (as elaborated in Sherman and Bently, The Making of Modern IP: The British Experience, CUP 1999): despite trade mark law’s growing modernisation – in terms of the development of abstract legal rules of general application, and driven by the law’s own internal and forward-looking logic – we show that the regulation of markings on watches exhibited features of pre-modern intellectual property law, i.e. marking regulation that was trade specific and reactive to particular problems as they emerged.
We argue that the persistence of pre-modern characteristics to legal regulation in the watch industry is explained by the market reality that, since at least the 1870s, hallmarks – obligatory marks intended to indicate the fineness of gold and silver – went beyond their statutory purpose to indicate the geographical origin of watches. This was most pronounced in the watch trade, due to the structure of the industry – its high degree of specialisation, such that there was no one ‘maker’ of a watch – combined with power relations in the supply chain, which meant that watches and watchcases only bore the trade mark or name of the retailer/dealer. Accordingly, consumers relied on the hallmark to indicate both the geographical origin of the watch (i.e. an English hallmark indicated that the watch was of English origin), and also the quality of the watch, as English watches at this time were considered superior to foreign watches. In Select Committee debates in the 1880s, the ‘hallmark’ was referred to as a ‘trade mark’ in relation to watches in these two senses. This paper examines attempts to regulate deception in the watch-trade caused by legally applied hallmarks, through special marking provisions in the Merchandise Marks Act 1887, and draws interdisciplinary conclusions fusing perspectives from legal and business/economic history.
Biographies:
Elena Cooper is Senior Lecturer at CREATe, University of Glasgow. Her work to date includes Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image (CUP, 2018) which was shortlisted by the Society of Legal Scholars for the Birks book prize for outstanding legal scholarship in 2020. Elena’s research into the history of trade mark law was funded by an Early Career Fellowship from The Leverhulme Trust and mentored by Prof. Lindsay Farmer, University of Glasgow. This includes her collaboration with Prof. David Higgins published in the Journal of Legal History in 2024: ‘Crime, Trade marks and Soft Trade Policy in the Interwar Era: Market Realities and the Merchandise Marks Act 1926’. Elena joined CREATe in 2014 from the University of Cambridge where she was Orton Fellow in Intellectual Property Law at Trinity Hall and also completed her PhD on copyright history supervised by Prof. Lionel Bently.
David Higgins is a professor in the accounting and finance division of Newcastle University Business School. He has published widely on the business and economic history of merchandise marks and trade marks. His recent publications in this field include, Brands, Geographical Origin, and the Global Economy, (CUP, 2018), and National Brands and Global Markets (edited with Nikolas Glover, Routledge, 2023).
Jennifer Davis is an historian and a lawyer. She is a member of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge and an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She has published widely in the area of 19th century poverty, law breaking and law enforcement. Her publications include studies of immigration, policing and the magistracy in London. She has also published in the area of intellectual property law with a particular interest in trade marks and unfair competition, viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective. As well as publishing articles on contemporary trade mark law and unfair competition and their history, together with the linguist Alan Durant, she has published a number of articles on the intersection between trade mark law and linguistics. With Jane Ginsburg and Lionel Bently she has edited two books which approach copyright and trade marks from an interdisciplinary perspective.