Are We Running out of Trademarks? College Sports Edition

As I watched the Kansas State Wildcats play the Kentucky Wildcats in the Sweet Sixteen this year, it occurred to me that there are an awful lot of Wildcats in the tournament (five, to be exact, or nearly 7.5% of the teams).  This made me think of the interesting new paper by Jeanne Fromer and Barton Beebe, called Are We Running Out of Trademarks? An Empirical Study of Trademark Depletion and Congestion. The paper is on SSRN, and is notable because it is the rare a) IP and b) empirical paper published by the Harvard Law Review. The abstract of the paper is here:American trademark law has long operated on the assumption that there exists an inexhaustible supply of unclaimed trademarks that are at least as competitively effective as those already claimed. This core empirical assumption underpins nearly every aspect of trademark law and policy. This Article presents empirical evidence showing that this conventional wisdom is wrong. The supply of competitively effective…

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