Last week LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® featured a guest post by Jane Coleman by way of the upcoming update to her book, Secondary Trademark Infringement. It addressed the question of how the doctrine of contributory liability’s asserted distinction between service providers and product suppliers deals with trademark licenses.
You can just imagine what a wacky summer it’s been at the Coleman place with an issue like that to banter about!
Good enough. But no less exciting — I’d argue, frankly, that it’s more exciting! — is that at the website of the same name, which formerly offered, online and for free, the core of what became the Bloomberg BNA treatise, and then cruelly withdrew all that learning from the free-o-sphere when the book stuff got serious, there is now some consolation for the educated public: A new overview of contributory liability in trademark, which, of course, is where most of the secondary liability action is anyway.
Thus you will want to bookmark “A Short History of Contributory Liability Doctrine.”
That’s not to say you shouldn’t still buy the book. If you don’t, frankly, the joke’s on you.
But, in a pinch, that link will probably do the trick.
