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1 results

  • 5 - University Brands as Geographical Indications

  • from Part II - Local and Global Dimensions
  • Edited by Mario Biagioli, University of California, Los Angeles, Madhavi Sunder
  • Book:
    Academic Brands
    Published online:
    22 July 2022
    Print publication:
    21 July 2022, pp 86-102
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  • Summary

    The brands of universities are best understood not as trademarks, but as geographical indications. The conventional American theory of trademarks has always been an ill fit for the merchandising uses that universities enforce their brands to protect, because those uses are grounded in anti-misappropriation impulses that traditional American trademark law has always looked on with ambivalence. But the use of a signifier to channel material support from consumers to a productive community (such as a university), out of support for the community itself rather than out of market demand for the community’s outputs, is perfectly consistent with the justifications typically offered for protection of geographical indications. While understanding university brands as geographical indications provides analytical clarity, it also reveals such brands have a potential dark side: they may give the community’s most generous and idiosyncratic benefactors an outsize role in deciding disputes over the community’s priorities and values.