Please wear “a yellow and green dragon suit with a blue cummerbund”—and not “pink formal dress ‘tails’ with knicker trousers” and “a typical diplomat’s sash”—in his honor

Wonderful to give a faculty workshop today at Cornell Law School on trademark law, images, and AI 🐻❤️™️ @cornelllaw.bsky.social

Washington Square News interview with me about NYU Law and fashion law nyunews.com/culture/bsty... @nyulaw.bsky.social

The Article then proposes that these key values are advanced by integrating in sensible ways awards of patent, copyright, and trademark rights to firstcomers, latercomers, and latercomers who create better.

It suggests that the purported values of “first”—fairness, order, societal benefits, and rhetorical value—are undermined to some degree by the mutations and contortions of “first” in intellectual property.

This Article explores what optimal rules of allocation look like in intellectual property.

This description and analysis show that the idea of “first,” something we reflexively believe to be objective and straightforward, is instead normative and thorny.

This Article’s thick description of how the principle of first possession actually operates in patent, copyright, and trademark laws lays bare that the idea of “first” has been mutated and contorted substantially.

This Article is about understanding the hold that the idea of “first” has over intellectual property laws.

I'm delighted that my article "First Ideas" is now published in the Georgetown Law Journal @georgetownlaw.bsky.social
www.law.georgetown.edu/georgetown-l...

Interesting data from @denniscrouch.bsky.social shedding light on gender and ethnicity of U.S. patent inventors patentlyo.com/patent/2026/...

Yes, it might trigger those who are more pedantic about using it as a verb 😜

Trademark folks should do the New York Times Strands puzzle today

Strands #749
“Trademarked no more”
🔵🔵🔵🟡🔵🔵

www.nytimes.com/games/strands

Hey @jeannefromer.bsky.social & @cjsprigman.bsky.social, if you're ever looking for a new casebook case about scènes à faire/tropes, this one might be worth considering.

Law professor David Tan donates 82 designer jackets worth over $350k to S’pore’s National Collection Law professor David Tan donates 82 designer jackets, valued over $350k, to Singapore's National Collection, enriching the museums' fashion archives. Read more at straitstimes.com. Read more at straits...

www.straitstimes.com/life/style/l...

David Tan (NUS) launched our "Fashion and Intellectual Property" book (with Dev Gangjee (Oxford)) at the National Museum of Singapore with a talk and a donation of 82 designer jackets (valued at over $350K) to the museum law.nus.edu.sg/ewbclb/media...

You may have noticed that when you ask an AI chatbot to evaluate ideas, it often starts with enthusiasm. And when you criticize its enthusiasm, it drops the enthusiasm. I asked Claude (Sonnet 4.6 extended) why it did this, and it had this reply—not news, but worth emphasizing.

SCOOP: Federal judiciary approves new Supreme Court defender office to help represent indigent defendants at #SCOTUS.

Its full-time director will serve as a counterweight to the U.S. solicitor general in federal criminal cases. The first will be former Kagan clerk and SG atty Ashley Robertson.

Comments are welcome!

In addition to providing a new conception of trade secrecy, this literature sheds light on how trade secret law might be modified to better accord with society's use for and of secrets.

It also provides a basis for a burgeoning view of trade secrecy law as protective of employees, not just businesses.

This overarching understanding also unifies the predominant, but separate, theories of trade secret law-as an incentive to innovate (or reduce secretkeeping costs) and as a regulation of commercial morality.

Moreover, because some secretkeeping can be personally or socially harmful, this literature also provides a framework to analyze when it might make sense for trade secret law to permit--or even encourage--the disclosure of corporate secrets.

At the same time, this body of literature explains why and when secretholders might be tempted to disclose the secrets they know, also clarifying trade secret law's prohibition of many such disclosures as misappropriation.

It explores the psychological & sociological literature on secrecy & uses it to make the case that secrets make secretholders feel like part of an exclusive club or secret society, fostering loyalty and bonds to their employer in a way that can explain the law's encouragement of corporate secrets.

I've just posted a draft of my new article on "Trade Secret Societies," which is forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review @uclalawreview.bsky.social papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Because keeping secrets together help people form bonds with each other, maybe the very act of having shared secret information can incentivize innovation. -- @jeannefromer.bsky.social #wipip26

trade secret societies! @jeannefromer.bsky.social #wipip26

the psychology & sociology of secrecy are at the core of what's being protected by TS law but the law hasn't done much grappling with it

www.bu.edu/law/engageme...

I’m excited to be at WIPIP at @bulaw.bsky.social today, where I’ll be talking about “Trade Secret Societies” (and I plan to be posting the paper draft very shortly)