College of William & Mary Law School William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository Faculty Publications Faculty and Deans 2007 The rT ademark/Copyright Divide Laura A. Heymann William & Mary Law School,
[email protected] Repository Citation Heymann, Laura A., "The rT ademark/Copyright Divide" (2007). Faculty Publications. 195. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/195 Copyright c 2007 by the authors. This article is brought to you by the William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs THE TRADEMARK/CoPYRIGHT DIVIDE Laura A. Heymann* I. INTRODUCTION N the mid-1980s, the well-known postmodern artist Jeff Koons dis played a sculpture called "String of Puppies" in a New York gallery.! I The sculpture was based wholly on a photograph, taken by a man named Art Rogers, of a couple with their arms full of puppies; Koons's sculpture, intended as a commentary on how mass-produced art has caused societal deterioration, caricatured the subjects of the photograph by placing flowers in their hair and clown noses on the puppies they were holding.2 Rogers, perhaps not surprisingly, brought suit against both Koons and his gallery and won a grant of summary judgment, which the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed.3 Per haps even less surprisingly, Rogers's successful claim was one for copy right infringement: Rogers alleged that Koons had created an unauthorized derivative work, and the Second Circuit rejected Koons's attempt to take advantage of copyright law's fair use provisions.4 But the ease with which Rogers brought, and the Second Circuit analyzed, Rog ers's copyright infringement claim masks the fact that the interest Rogers was seeking to protect was probably not a copyright interest at all.