Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2017 Intellectual Property As Seen by Barbie and Mickey: The Reciprocal Relationship of Copyright and Trademark Law Jane C. Ginsburg Columbia Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons, and the Intellectual Property Law Commons Recommended Citation Jane C. Ginsburg, Intellectual Property As Seen by Barbie and Mickey: The Reciprocal Relationship of Copyright and Trademark Law, JOURNAL OF THE COPYRIGHT SOCIETY OF THE USA, VOL. 65, P. 245, 2018; COLUMBIA PUBLIC LAW RESEARCH PAPER NO. 14-567 (2017). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2072 This Working Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. [forthcoming, Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA] Intellectual Property as Seen by Barbie and Mickey: The Reciprocal Relationship of Copyright and Trademark Law Jane C. Ginsburg* Abstract Some years ago, caselaw on trademark parodies and similar unauthorized “speech” uses of trademarks could have led one to conclude that the law had no sense of humor. Over time, however, courts in the US and elsewhere began to leaven likelihood of confusion analyses with healthy skepticism regarding consumers’ alleged inability to perceive a joke. These decisions did not always expressly cite the copyright fair use defense, but the considerations underlying the copyright doctrine seemed to inform trademark analysis as well.