Friday, April 17, 2009

When casebooks become cases

Mark McKenna pointed me to this story about a lawsuit over a casebook supplement that bears the name of the casebook authors but didn't come from them. He asks whether Dastar is a problem. Courts have been, at a minimum, confused over the application of Dastar to explicit passing off; at the very least, this seems like a case in which the rump cause of action for false advertising should apply.

This is even more meta because the Ginsburg et al. trademark casebook contained, or at least used to contain (my memory for editions is a bit limited, and they really reshaped this section after Dastar), a hypothetical about a publisher who put out a new edition of a casebook with different authors but original names.

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