alex roberts

Surveillance innovator accuses ICE of widespread patent infringement The patent holder, SecureNet Solutions Group, was an operating company which shuttered almost two decades ago and has asserted its patents since 2015 in 17 US district court cases

get in, losers, we're going... to sue ICE for patent infringement

www.iam-media.com/article/surv...

actually all my "personal brand" alerts this week are about teens i guess

www.forbes.com/sites/sarahh...

'Swiftie' is officially a word on Dictionary.com The website officially defines a "Swiftie" as a "fan of the music of Taylor Swift." The singer trademarked the word back in 2017 and uses it on her merchandise.

"swiftie" added to the dictionary: language accretion via trademark registration?

www.kvue.com/video/life/s...

...aaand here's one about high school students going to summer camp where they can learn to design their personal brand

news.nau.edu/summer-camp-...

Students offered personal brand coaching - Shelter Island Reporter A free, hands-on workshop will be offered for local high school students who may be thinking about college, internships, or their first job, at the North Fork Arts Center in Greenport. “Brand You! Acc...

when i present my project on (against) personal brand as IP i mention PB used to be for entrepreneurs & celebs but it's now billed as required for everyone

here's a current article about high school students receiving "personal brand coaching"

shelterislandreporter.timesreview.com/2026/03/02/s...

it was definitely my longest time from submission to acceptance in my ~14 years of publishing scholarship

& in chatting with folks at an IP conference last weekend, everyone was in the same boat, including the very fanciest among us

i feel for the junior/pretenured folks especially...

a great jumping-off point for noem to launch her career as a full-time influencer!

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

this book was going great until it mixed up patent with trademark 😭

none of it is that bad except I think sour patch will be kind of gross but idk 🤷🏻‍♀️

😂

weird hamantaschen my kids made this year:
-sour patch kid
-crushed thin mint
-exploded rainbow marshmallow unicorn
-mixed berry nutella chocolate chip
-non-triangular dirty ball of dough
-mystery leftover halloween candy?

Lululemon, Costco Partly Settle IP Lawsuit Over Dupe Jackets Lululemon Athletica Inc. settled part of its lawsuit accusing Costco-sold activewear of infringing the yoga apparel company’s popular sweatshirt and jacket designs.

"Lululemon struck the deal amid pressure from Moret’s bid to cancel two of the company’s design patents covering its bestselling 'Scuba' sweatshirts."

yessssss

Thanks for live tweeting my presentation! FYI my proposal - which I include in my new "Trademarks and Free Speech" book - is a statutory defense for noncommercial use of a mark other than as a mark. Such uses are very unlikely to cause source confusion.

boston to nyc 😂

am slightly concerned this is amtrak’s way of warning me the 4 hour ride might actually take 9?

extremely not

the math is really not mathing

The Week in Shopping: Instagram’s “Shop the Look” Wars Influencers are outraged that Instagram is adding shoppable links to their posts without their involvement or consent, while other users may want to ask why Meta is quietly stress-testing the limits o...

I spoke with @puck.news about this & discussed it on thursday’s “influencer law” panel at @nusl

meta is adding AI slop links to unwitting influencers’ posts, which looks like false advertising, false endorsement, & misappropriation of right of publicity

puck.news/behind-insta...

I hear you but I probably don’t do justice to the project in my live-tweeting it so I hope people will reserve judgment until they read the draft!

Last session of #WIPIP2026, and Alex Roberts @lexlanham.bsky.social asks “are we human, or are we brands now?” Or “I curated this look, so I must own it!” - Litigating Personal Brand: Intellectual Property & Construction of the Self

how to accomplish?
*congress could change the law (haha)
*could accomplish through the courts, which is where these problems were created in the first place

a TM owner can have & assert both rights, but they can't be alternative claims in the same case. your theory is either i'm using this as a signifier, or i'm not. otherwise we go down the path of dilution.

then we wouldn't need sponsorship confusion at all. we can get rid of initial interest & post-sale confusion. all of those doctrines do far more harm than good, and only work in the service of protecting brand rights. most uses on unrelated goods won't be viewed as confusing.

proposal includes a renown requirement & Ps have to prove Ds are trying to trade on their brand value, which incl. using something identical or extremely similar (more similar than TM law requires)

if the thing i want is the brand, the attempted substitute needs to be the same

what are brand rights?

interest isn't in IDing goods: the brand itself is the intrinsic value, the thing people want. they might not signal quality of underlying product--there might not even be an underlying product--but just the brand itself, which ppl value for its own sake

the authors have resisted these trends as hard as possible, but have lost the battle. what would it mean to give those quasi-property or misappropriation rights in brands explicitly? brand rights should be brand rights, not trademark rights.

TMs are supposed to prevent confusion, but increasingly it does so many other things. product placement, merchandise rights, brands as just brands.

so we have accommodated that with post-sale, initial interest, distortions on LOC, association/affiliation

lemley & mckenna: "trademarks without confusion: can brand rights rescue trademark law?"

#wipip26

farley argues the substantive choices were hidden in procedural dress, but they're in there and they're important

treaty itself says "this is procedural, not substantive"--but that's not true