Recent reading: Trade Marks and Brands: An Interdisciplinary Critique

Editors: Lionel Bently, Jennifer Davis, and Jane C. Ginsburg. This 2008 European-tilting collection makes a good complement to Graeme Dinwoodie & Mark Janis's Trademark Law and Theory: A Handbook of Contemporary Research (in which I have a chapter). It features some helpful UK history as well as debates over the role of linguistics, marketing, sociology, law & economics, philosophy, and anthropology in trademark law, and a final bit on GIs. As you'd expect, dilution is a heavy hitter here; while almost every contributor in the theory sections takes trademark confusion as a fairly easy concept to justify (Mark McKenna would have something to say about that as to noncompeting goods), almost every one also feels that it's important to take a position on whether, or how, dilution is to be justified, either with theories of branding or theories of protection from forced expression.