Michigan Law Review Volume 103 Issue 8 2005 Search and Persuasion in Trademark Law Barton Beebe Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr Part of the Consumer Protection Law Commons, Intellectual Property Law Commons, Law and Society Commons, and the Marketing Law Commons Recommended Citation Barton Beebe, Search and Persuasion in Trademark Law, 103 MICH. L. REV. 2020 (2005). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol103/iss8/2 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by the Michigan Law Review at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Michigan Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SEARCH AND PERSUASION IN TRADEMARK LAW Barton Beebe* TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION: THE SOVEREIGN AND THE FOOL.. .............. 2021 II. THE MEANING OF TRADEMARK DISTINCTIVENESS............ ... 2026 A. Distinctiveness as Source Distinctiveness ........................... 2028 B. Distinctiveness as Differential Distinctiveness or Strength .. .......................................................................... 2029 C. Trademark Distinctiveness and Trademark Scope ........... 2031 III. SEARCH SOPHISTICATION AND TRADEMARK SCOPE ............ 2035 A. Search Sophistication and the Search Sophistication Curve ..................................................................................... 2035 B . Self-Positioning on the Search Sophistication Curve........ 2039 IV. PERSUASION SOPHISTICATION AND TRADEMARK SCOPE .... 2042 A. Differential Distinctiveness and Persuasion ...................... 2043 B. Persuasion Sophistication and the Persuasion Sophistication Curve.... ..... ...................................................2047 C. Self-Positioning on the Persuasion Sophistication Curve ........ .......................... ................. .................................. 2051 V. THE RELATION BETWEEN SEARCH SOPHISTICATION AND PERSUASION SOPHISTICATION .................................................. 2055 A. Persuasion and the Politics of Trademark Critique .......... 2056 1. Th e Tensions in the Restrictionist Account of Persuasion ........................................................ .... ........ .. 2056 2. The Tensions in the Apologist Account of Persuasion ............................. ......................................... 2057 3. The Cultural Populist Strain in Trademark Commentary .. .......... ........ ............................................... 2059 * Assistant Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. B.A. 1992, University of Chicago; Ph.D 1998, Princeton; J.D. 2000, Yale. - Ed. Many thanks to Jennifer Arlen, Bob Brauneis, Julie Cohen, Dan Crane, Graeme Dinwoodie, Justin Hughes, Arthur Jacobsen, John McGinnis, and Amrit Singh for comments made on earlier drafts. The Article also greatly benefited from comments made on an earlier draft by Peggy Radin and Mark Lemley as part of the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum 2005, and from presentations made to the University of Michigan Law School Intellectual Property Workshop, the George Washington University Law School Intellectual Property Speakers Series, the Cardozo Law School Junior Faculty Workshop, and the Chicago Intellectual Property Colloquium. Comments welcome: [email protected]. 2020 August 2005] Search and Persuasion 2021 B. Th e Relation Between Search Sophistication and Persuasion Sophistication .................................................. 2060 1. The Schizophrenic Consumer.. ................. .................. 2061 2. Persuasion Within Information....... ............................ 2064 C. Th e Dynamic Driving the Expansion of Trademark Scope .... .......... ... .......... ... .. ............. .............. .... ..... .... ..........2066 VI. CONCLUSION: THE SOVEREIGN TRADEMARK .. ... ........ ..... ...2069 I. INTRODUCTION: THE SOVEREIGN AND THE FOOL The consumer, we are led to believe, is the measure of all things in trademark law. Trademarks exist only to the extent that consumers perceive them as designations of source. Infringement occurs only to the extent that consumers perceive one trademark as referring to the source of another. The most "intellectual" of the intellectual properties, trademarks are a property purely of consumers' minds.1 The simple idealist ontology2 underlying trademark law is largely responsible for the law's characteristic instability. Since 1992, the Supreme Court has considered - and in some cases, reconsidered - seven trademark cases.3 The Court's copyright cases garner the media 1. See RICHARD L. KIRKPATRICK, LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION IN TRADEMARK LAW, at xx (2000) ("[T]rademarks are intellectual or psychological in nature. It follows that the question of trademark infringement is primarily one of the psychology - cognitive and behavioral - of consumers. A mark infringes when it is likely to cause a mental state of confusion in an appreciable number of consumers."); Jerre B. Swann, Sr. et al., Trademarks and Marketing, 91 TRADEMARK REP. 787, 804 (2001)("Brands, quite literally, are 'hostages' in the minds of consumers, and are thus inherently fragile ...." (footnote omitted)); Sonia K. Katya), Anti-Branding (Sept. 20, 2004) (unpublished working paper, on file with author) ("[T]he 'perfect convergence advertisers seek between the sign, corporate, and consumer identity is an indelibly precarious enterprise because it relies on traditionally unstable tools like image, suggestion, and visual expression to build economic value. By relying on these unstable tools - speech, suggestion, performance - a trademark becomes Janus-faced, both mutable and immutable at the same time."); cf Scandia Down Corp. v. Euroquilt, Inc. , 772 F.2d 1423, 1430 (7th Cir. 1985) ("The value of a trademark is in a sense a 'hostage' of consumers; if the seller disappoints the consumers, they respond by devaluing the trademark."); MARGARET JANE RADIN, REINTERPRETING PROPERTY 191-202 (1993) (discussing the double meaning of "property" as expressive of a "deep fissure in liberal ideology"). 2. See Wolfgang Grassl, The Reality of Brands: Towards an Ontology of Marketing, 58 AM. J. ECON. & Soc. 313, 317 (1999) ("All views that regard brands as rooted in the perception of consumers may be collectively classified as idealist conceptions of branding... It follows from this view that any product can potentially be branded or, in an operationalist formulation, that the conditions for a product to become a brand reside not in product space but depend only on marketing management. To be a brand, then, ultimately means to be perceived or known to be a brand or to have been forged into a brand."). 3. See KP Permanent Make-Up, Inc. v. Lasting Impression I, Inc., 125 S.Ct. 542 (2004); Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003); Moseley v. V Secret Catalogue, Inc., 537 U.S. 418 (2003); TrafFix Devices, Inc. v. Mktg. Displays, Inc., 532 U.S. 23 (2001); Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Samara Bros., Inc., 529 U.S. 205 (2000); Qualitex Co. v. Jacobson Prods. Co., 514 U.S. 159 (1995); Two Pesos, Inc. v. Taco Cabana, Inc., 505 U.S. 763 (1992). TrafFix Devices substantially rewrote Qualitex, see TrafFix Devices, 532 U.S. at 32- 34, while Wa l-Mart Stores significantly complicated our understanding of Two Pesos. See 2022 Michigan Law Review [Vol. 103:2020 and celebrity attention,4 but it is the trademark cases that most clearly express the unsteady state, the entre deux temps condition, of current American intellectual property law. There is a reason for this. Trademark law is arguably the most difficult of the intellectual property laws to contemplate, and its outcomes when applied to facts are the most difficult to predict. This is because it requires a form of what John Keats called "negative capability,"5 the capability, more specifically, to think through the consumer and see the marketplace only as the consumer sees it.6 From the beginning, trademark law has sought to resist the negative capability called for by its underlying idealism. It has sought to limit the dependence of the object of the law, the trademark, on the vagaries of the subject of the law, the consumer. In doing so, the law has embraced an "ideal type"7 of the subject. Just as copyright doctrine has based itself upon a largely mythical "author construct,"8 Wa l-Mart Stores, 529 U.S. at 215 (distinguishing the mysterious "tenium quid" at issue in Two Pesos). The situation before the European Court of Justice is little better. See S.M. Maniatis, Whither European Trade Mark Law? Arsenal and Davidoff: The Creative Disorder Stage, 7 MARQ. INTELL. PROP. L. REV. 99 (2003); Sebastien J. Evrard, Note, Trademark Law in the European Union: An Overview of the Ca se Law of the Court ofJustice and the Court of First Instance (1997-2001), 9 COLUM. J. EUR. L. 175 (2002). See generally Graeme B. Dinwoodie, Th e Tra demark Jurisprudence of the Rhenquist Court, 8 MARQ. INTELL. PROP. L. REV. 187 (2004); David S. Welkowitz, The Supreme Court and Trademark Law in the New Millennium, 30 WM. MITCHELL L. REV. 1659 (2004). 4. See Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003); N.Y. Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 483 (2001); Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994). 5. Keats defined "negative capability" variously. Compare JOHN KEATS, LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS 43 (Robert Gittings ed., 1970) (defining "negative