Yearly Archives: 2019

What We’ve Got Here Is a Failure to Indicate

Dec 4, 2019 Laura A. HeymannAdd a Comment

When a new word or catchphrase enters the social lexicon, some individuals will rush to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to try to be the first to obtain a trademark registration. That was the case with one John E. Gillard, who applied pro se to register #COVFEFE for hats, T-shirts, and related goods mere hours after the President included the word at the end of a midnight tweet on May 31, 2017. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board affirmed refusal of the registration on the grounds that #COVFEFE, as a “sui generis nonsense word” that allowed users and observers to “project onto it any meaning they wish,” failed to function as a trademark for the applicant’s goods, particularly given the wide array of merchandise from different sources already featuring the term.

The question may be a bit murkier, though, when the applied-for mark has a closer association with the applicant. In August, many media outlets were abuzz with the news that The Ohio State University had filed an application seeking a trademark registration for the word THE, for use on “clothing, namely t-shirts, baseball caps and hats” in “standard characters, without claim to any particular font style, size, or color.” Included among the submitted specimens was a photograph of a women’s T-shirt from “The Official Team Shop of Buckeye Nation®,” depicting a red shirt with the word THE in large block letters, with a smaller Ohio State logo underneath, as well as a photograph of a white baseball cap with the word THE in large red capital letters. The popular reaction seemed to revolve around the perception that it was ludicrous to obtain a trademark registration for a common English word, even though many such trademarks exist. (APPLE comes immediately to mind.)

A more nuanced critique, as Alexandra Roberts’s insightful article Trademark Failure to Function helps us to understand, would ask whether THE functions as a trademark in this context — whether consumers would use the word THE on the front of a T-shirt or cap to allow them to find merchandise produced by (or perhaps authorized by) the university or whether the word functions simply as an expressive device, a way of communicating support for the institution and/or its athletic teams (what trademark law calls ornamental use). This, of course, is not an issue limited to Ohio State’s application. A consumer who buys a t-shirt with a swoosh on the front may be using the swoosh both to identify a perceived high-quality shirt and to communicate to others that the consumer is a person who wears Nike apparel. But when what is on the front of the shirt is less likely to be used to communicate the quality of the manufacture, as with many T-shirts adorned with words or graphics, one might ask whether it is functioning as a trademark at all. Indeed, on September 11, the trademark examining attorney refused Ohio State’s registration. Given the location of the word THE on the “upper-center area on the front of the shirt and the front portion of the hat, where ornamental elements often appear,” the examining attorney concluded, the word did not function as a trademark to indicate the source of Ohio State’s merchandise. It remains to be seen whether Ohio State will challenge this conclusion or abandon its attempt to seek registration.

Professor Roberts’s article highlights that the “failure to function” doctrine has not received enough attention from trademark scholars, particularly in comparison to the question of trademark distinctiveness. The two are different, although related. Distinctiveness analyzes the semantic content of a mark — whether consumers will understand the mark to have a relationship to its good or service that conveys that it is functioning as a proper name and not as a description or generic term. The trademark GREYHOUND for bus services will be interpreted by consumers as a proper name, we surmise, because the term is being deployed metaphorically. One must first understand that greyhounds are known for being fast animals before one can understand that the mark suggests that the bus service is also fast. Because the mark owner could have conveyed this information more directly by using a word like “speedy,” we assume that consumers will conclude that the choice to use a metaphor must mean that the mark owner intends the mark as a name. The Abercrombie spectrum (derived from Abercrombie & Fitch Co. v. Hunting World, Inc.), a hierarchy of trademark distinctiveness, is a mainstay of trademark validity analysis.

Whether a trademark functions as a mark, however, asks whether the mark “appear[s] where consumers expect a trademark to appear” and whether it is “sufficiently set off from the surrounding text and images to attract notice” (P. 1981) — in other words, the “visual relationship” between the mark and its goods or services rather than the “conceptual relationship” between them. (P. 1983.) The interaction between distinctiveness and function, Professor Roberts contends, is “interdependent and inverse: the less distinctive a mark is, the greater indicators of trademark use are needed to ensure consumers will perceive it as a mark, and vice-versa.” (P. 1987.) In other words, consumers might recognize a fanciful term such as a pharmaceutical name no matter how it appears, but a less distinctive mark might require visual clues such as font, color, design, or a ™ symbol to convey that it is intended as a mark. These are things that the marketing and design literature has studied for some time, and Professor Roberts mines the research to demonstrate the importance of a consumer-centric analysis. Scholars building on her work might think about the ways in which these interpretations depend, as Rebecca Tushnet has noted, on understanding the role of implication in speech and on cultural competency; considerations of literacy, visual acuity, and other tools that consumers may or may not bring to the table may also complicate the analysis.

Because courts have not paid enough attention to the failure to function doctrine, writes Professor Roberts, and often analyze it separately from distinctiveness, the doctrine has been underdeveloped, which means that some faulty registrations have managed to escape close review. A tandem review also militates against strategic lawyering, as Professor Roberts points out, as a savvy trademark practitioner can easily help her client overcome a failure to function refusal by, for example, advising the creation of a hangtag or other ways commonly used to indicate trademark use.

The article caused me to think more deeply about something I had largely taken for granted. Professor Roberts’s focus is largely on word marks, but her analysis of trade dress and the Seabrook standard provides a helpful way of considering the various ways in which we assume consumers will understand trademarks. The more nuanced analysis she suggests doesn’t always, of course, provide an easy answer. Professor Roberts cites as examples of error the registration of #BeUnprecedented for legal research services and #SharetheSilence for alcoholic beverages, contending that the specimens offered no evidence that consumers would see these as anything but hashtags. (Pp. 2011-2012.) But a marketing expert might argue that those are exactly the kinds of phrases one would develop as a slogan for a client, and consumers in this context might assume that the hashtag developed from a slogan, rather than the reverse. Those who follow the news might immediately understand that #COVFEFE refers to the President’s tweet, not to any one manufacturer, but do buyers of Ohio State apparel understand THE to be only an expression of fan support or also an indicator of licensed merchandise? And if the university’s registration attempt is ultimately successful, what will consumers learn from that about trademark law generally?

Professor Roberts’s article reminds us that consumer perceptions are both the cause and the result of trademark validity. And it comes at the right time: The TTAB, as John L. Welch has documented, appears to be focusing more on failure-to-function in recent months, which makes Professor Roberts’s article even more relevant for practitioners as well as scholars. (A commenter at Mr. Welch’s blog offers the perceptive suggestion that the recent spate of failure-to-function denials at the TTAB may be evidence of a developing post-Brunetti strategy, as this example may confirm.) Failure to function may have been a somewhat dormant doctrine in recent years, but thanks to Professor Roberts, we can better understand the benefits of its coming out of hibernation.

Right of Repair in the Digital Economy

Nov 6, 2019 Jessica SilbeyAdd a Comment

We have long understood that people have a right to repair what they own, but this right to repair is under siege. A new article by Leah Chan Grinvald and Ofer Tur-Sinai explains how IP rules are inhibiting these repair rights and why laws protecting the right to repair are necessary and justifiable. As I explain below, authors Grinvald and Tur-Sinai describe the growing right to repair movement pushing for legislation to protect the right to repair and show how intellectual property laws should facilitate not interfere with consumers rights to repair what they own. The authors also propose a theoretical framework through which they analyze the intellectual property doctrine as enabling rather than inhibiting of consumer rights..

The right of repair problem is easy to identify and touches many aspects of everyday life. Our coffee machines break and, because certain components are protected by patent and copyright, this relatively simply machine cannot be fixed except by the manufacturer, who charges as much as the machine itself to replace the part. Automobile repairs performed only by “authorized dealers” preserve warranty agreements and are enforced through trademark law as well as patent law. These kinds of restrictions  make the market for repairs tightly controlled and expensive, sometimes entirely foreclosed, pushing consumers to buy new products instead of fixing old ones. The restrictions benefit manufacturers and their business partners. But it hurts consumers and repair shops and contributes to substantial amounts of waste inhibiting efforts at reversing devasting climate change.

In an elegant analysis, the Article identifies IP as both the problem and solution to protecting the right of repair. In a reversal of the usual use of IP, the authors cleverly rely on IP law’s internal justification of utilitarianism, incentivizing innovation, personal autonomy, scientific progress, and promoting information disclosure to justify expanding access to consumer products for users and small-businesses as opposed to strengthening control in the owners of intellectual property. When this analysis is paired with the socio-legal movement also described in this Article – the consortium of independent repair shops, “do-it-yourselfers,” and e-recyclers – the Article is a helpful and insightful roadmap for the “fair repair” legislative initiatives across the country.

One of the Article’s many engaging qualities is its plethora of details about the “fair repair” movement and the overwhelming variety of everyday consumer products affected. The Article describes legislative initiatives in approximately 20 states, the proposed model legislation for the “right to repair,” and the problems the legislation has been facing. In the process the authors paint a picture of a socio-political movement that should be relevant to most people but somehow has stayed relatively obscure. The examples of IP rules burdening or blocking our ability to repair cell phones, coffee makers, computers, agricultural machinery and home heating and cooling systems, to name just a few, are sufficiently ubiquitous for the problem described to feel personal and urgent.

The Article’s central innovation is its configuration of the “right of repair” in terms of four concentric circles.At the core is the individual consumer’s right to repair goods they own without interference by the original manufacturers. For this right, the Authors rely heavily on the first sale doctrine – the IP principle that once owned, an object is the dominion of the owner free from restrictions by others to use, resell, alter, or destroy.

The next level circle expands the right of repair beyond consumers to repair shops and includes not only repair (as a form of property use) but diffusing information regarding repair, such as through instructional videos, paper manuals, or advertising. The Authors argue that diffusion of repair information is essential to enable the right of repair in a meaningful manner. This circle implicates First Amendment interests and the legality of circumventing “digital locks” that prevent access to technological mechanisms in need of repair.

The third circle focuses on the right to make, sell and use replacement parts in competition with the original equipment manufacturer. This level of the right to repair aims to disrupt the original manufacturers’ monopoly over replacement parts – a monopoly IP law arguably grants them – while preserving some market share to IP owners to earn profits necessary to incentivize the parts’ production in the first place.

The fourth circle proposes an affirmative duty of original manufacturers to ensure effective implementation of the right to repair. The Authors acknowledge this may be the most controversial component of their analysis but it is the focus of the model legislation currently debated and thus essential for a thorough discussion. It is also one of the most interesting aspects of the Article because it directly addresses the challenging theoretical issue of “rights” being meaningful only when complemented by “affirmative duties.” This discussion mentions the possible fruitful path of compulsory IP licenses and the difficulties posed by the 2016 Defend Trade Secrets Act.

At each level of the right to repair, the Authors analyze the relevant IP doctrines and legislative initiatives, emphasizing tweaks to IP doctrines necessary to effectuate the right and legislative corrections that would make proposed “right of repair” bills stronger or more likely to succeed. At the end of the Article, the Authors address lingering and plausible critiques of their proposals – such as maintaining quality, economic loss, and counterfeiting – tying up some of the loose ends that are inevitable in an ambitious project such as this one.

As all IP professors know, IP laws overlap, and that complicates the analysis of their application across a range of scenarios. Students nonetheless usually learn IP law doctrine-by-doctrine, and the justice implications of IP law can be frustratingly marginal in many introductory courses. But this Article and the right to repair for which it advocates provides serial examples that demand inter-doctrinal analysis combining trademark and patent law, for example, or copyright with design patent law. And in the context of the right of repair, the analysis also demands attention to welfare and environmental justice and implications of consumers investing in property they are legally forbidden to maintain.  It is an article easily used when teaching to draw on these overlapping IP issues that also combine civil rights concerns, or to refer to students searching for a research topic with contemporary significance and many still-unanswered questions.

Although drawing on a political movement already afoot, this Article reads like a call to arms written by advocates who are equally theoretical and practical to launch a successful revolution. The elegance and thoroughness of the Article’s arguments, however, diminish the need for a revolution of IP law and call only for targeted adjustments fully consistent with IP law’s purposes and structural features. There are other likely partners in this movement left untapped. I couldn’t help but think of the many rights on which we rely that are dependent on others and on which this Article’s analysis could draw – rights to reproductive freedom and the right to vote, for example, both of which are under siege at the moment and critical to the human autonomy and equality on which this Article’s “right of repair” ultimately relies. Perhaps painting with too broad a brush and drawing analogies to controversial subjects undermines the Authors’ agenda. The Article’s framework is IP law, not constitutional law, but their mutual resonance makes the Article intriguing and timely. It is well worth consideration as a model of IP scholarship increasingly relevant in the digital age.

Erie and Unfair Competition’s Long and Winding Road

Oct 14, 2019 Mark McKennaAdd a Comment

In her excellent addition to the Akron Law Review’s intellectual property volume, The Erie/Sears/Compco Squeeze: Erie’s Effects on Unfair Competition and Trade Secret Law, Sharon Sandeen “tells the story of the efforts undertaken in the aftermath of Erie to fill the gaps it left in the law of unfair competition.” Sandeen is particularly interested in the effect of Erie on what I would describe as the non-trademark-related areas of unfair competition, and especially the failed efforts to broaden the Lanham Act to cover trade secrets or otherwise develop general federal unfair competition legislation.

The tale goes like this: Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in Erie, federal courts developed a robust common law of unfair competition. Sandeen describes that law as general federal common law, though it is only through the lens of Erie that the “federal” part of that formulation stands out. Federal courts developing unfair competition law before Erie didn’t think they were developing a different law than were state courts, and as Sandeen illustrates, federal courts were considerably more active in this area than state courts. Those federal courts thought they were developing the law of unfair competition. Erie created substantial uncertainty by throwing the status of that body of law into doubt and threatening disuniformity as states developed their own bodies of unfair competition law. Disuniformity was a significant concern, particularly to large commercial entities doing business nationally. Reformers made a variety of efforts to solve that problem with federal unfair competition legislation, and as Sandeen describes in detail, they largely failed. The reasons for that failure shed some interesting light on the coherence of the category of unfair competition—a category that has evolved considerably over time.

Sandeen thoroughly recounts concerns that the Erie decision “left gaps” in unfair competition law. But many of those purported “gaps” weren’t really attributable to Erie. As Sandeen shows, the substance of unfair competition was in considerable flux over the middle of the twentieth century. When Edward Rogers, the primary drafter of the Lanham Act, and others pushed for a federal law of unfair competition, they weren’t just trying to restore federal courts’ ability to rely on and develop federal common law. They were trying to create a considerably more expansive understanding of unfair competition.

For one thing, Rogers and others wanted courts to allow unfair competition claims even when the parties were not in competition. But the requirement of competition was not invented by state courts after Erie. It was always central to the concept of unfair competition, which was, after all, so named for a reason. The advocates for a federal unfair competition statute were also pushing for recognition of claims against a wider range of conduct than was traditionally recognized. Erie was, in a significant sense, more of an opportunity to change the law than the cause of new problems.

Sandeen also highlights another way in which the changing scope of “unfair competition” makes generalization in this area so difficult. On the one hand, courts did not respond to efforts to interpret §44 of the Lanham Act to create a general federal law of unfair competition. And as she documents exhaustively, efforts to pass other federal legislation largely failed. In that respect, unfair competition writ large was never federalized. Importantly in terms of Sandeen’s interests as a trade secret scholar, trade secrets were not swept into a broader federal unfair competition framework.

Courts did, however, federalize one very important part of unfair competition law when they radically expanded the scope of §43(a) of the Lanham Act to recognize causes of action involving “unregistered” trademarks. I use scare quotes there because calling the designations at issue in those cases unregistered trademarks was really a sleight of hand. In general, parties brought unfair competition claims precisely because they did not own (technical) trademarks. A much smaller universe of designators were considered trademarks in that era—only words or logos that did not provide any direct information about the nature of the products, their geographic origin, etc. Only designations that qualified as technical trademarks were federally registrable, and only federally registered trademarks could be enforced under federal law. Passing off by means other than use of a technical trademark was remediable by common law unfair competition. That difference was not only jurisdictional—unfair competition claims had different proof requirements and more limited remedies.

By re-denominating the designations at issue in unfair competition cases as “unregistered trademarks,” courts were doing much more than federalizing unfair competition claims. They were changing the nature and structure of trademark and unfair competition doctrine by expanding the subject matter of trademark law proper and emptying that part of unfair competition. In this context, then, federalization was not only, and perhaps even primarily, about solving a problem of disuniformity. It was instead a chance to expand the law to accommodate a wider range of designators and to treat them more favorably.

The most interesting thing about Sandeen’s chapter is the way it highlights substantial differences in the evolution of different parts of what many now consider unfair competition law. Courts had little resistance to federalizing the historical core of unfair competition—cases alleging passing off by means other than a technical trademark—using the Lanham Act to assimilate those claims to trademark law. They also recognized certain other semi-related claims (false endorsement) under the same section. But reformers were much less effective pushing federalization of a broader range of claims, including trade secrets.

That history is instructive because it suggests something implicit and unarticulated about the boundaries of unfair competition. Once upon a time, unfair competition had a fairly coherent and narrow meaning. All the claims recognized involved deceptive conduct that had the effect of diverting customers who otherwise would have gone to the claimant. The clearest example was passing off, which consisted of falsely indicating that your goods were those of another in order to secure the patronage that otherwise would have gone to the other. But other kinds of claims fit this pattern too. Product disparagement, for example, was recognized because it entailed a false claim about a competitor’s product for the purpose of diverting that competitor’s customers to oneself. Over time, unfair competition became a catch-all for claims based on bad things someone does in commerce. No longer do the claims require direct competition, and the “unfair” part of the formulation appears to have lost any independent meaning.

Sandeen helps us see one part of the explanation for that by highlighting the efforts the reformers made over the middle of the twentieth century to expand the concept of unfair competition to include a broader range of claims. But it’s notable that courts and Congress resisted the breadth reformers sought. The point shouldn’t be overstated. The fact that courts and Congress weren’t persuaded to dump everything into a general federal unfair competition law doesn’t mean none of those claims were recognized in some form (certainly trade secrecy long has been). The reasons for resisting full federalization are varied and sometimes context-specific. Still, one can’t help thinking there’s something to the reluctance to lump all of the purported unfair competition claims together. Perhaps by thinking through the distinctions sometimes made implicitly, we can make some progress on a theory of unfair competition that has substantive content.

From Venetian Glass to Contemporary Intellectual Property: Revisiting Tailored Patent Regimes

Sep 25, 2019 Ana Santos Rutschman1 comment

The apparent one-size-fits-all configuration of contemporary intellectual property systems has troubled many a scholar. The topic has a particular salience in patent law and policy, where debates about the need to tailor legal regimes to technology-specific domains remain an evergreentheme. Stefania Fusco takes an interesting spin on that debate by looking backwards—far backwards, to the place and industry that are inextricably tied to the imagination of patent aficionados as the birthplace of the formalized patent system: early modern Venice and its glassmaking industry. And she puts forward an intriguing proposition: the place that exported the patent system to Europe and the United States had tailorable components, designed to calibrate incentives to innovation; why do we not consider a similar approach in early 21st century America?

In Murano Glass Vase, Fusco briefly recounts the history of the glassmaking industry in Venice, framing it as the natural experiment from which the patent system sprang into the world. In the past, the Venetian model has received the attention of legal scholars like Ted Sichelman and Sean O’Connor, who explored the competition-enhancing properties of patents issued by the Venetian state. Like her predecessors, Fusco emphasizes the mix of exclusionary rights and trade secrecy that formed the backbone of Venetian innovation policy against the backdrop of a heavily regulated and protectionist economy. She describes how that mix was key in attracting foreign talent to Venice and how it facilitated technology transfer among the city state and the outer world.

In Lessons from the Past: The Venetian Republic’s Tailoring of Patent Protection to the Characteristics of the Invention, Fusco draws on original research performed at the Venetian State Archives to further the Murano narrative by looking at how the Venetian government fueled an ad hoc patent regime across industries by tailoring it to specific technologies. While Lessons from the Past makes several contributions of historical and comparative interest, I would like to focus on Fusco’s study of the implications of regime tailoring for regulatory policy. After all, it is not every day that someone discusses Venice in 1474 in the same breath (or abstract) as the 2011 Leahy-Smith America Invents Act.

1474 was the year in which the Venetian Patent Act was enacted, originating a system that was quite similar to contemporary statutory patent regimes: Venetian patents were issued for a period of 10 years and a fixed monetary penalty was established for patent infringement. At the same time, a customary patent regime also developed. Customary patents, unlike statutory ones, were flexible: they could be awarded for a fixed period of time, varying between 10 and 60 years, for life or in perpetuity; and the penalty for infringement could take the form of a per-item formula or a flat fee, set at a value well above statutory recovery. As Fusco’s research shows, the Senate used this flexibility to grant lengthier terms to patents relevant to certain fields (chief among which, that of water-related technology, ever so important to a city build in a lagoon).

Fusco then explores work by Lemley and Burk to tie the Venetian experience to the question of whether it would be appropriate today to tailor existing patent regimes to certain fields of technology. Of course, some of the mechanisms that were available to Venetian regulators are no longer an option in this era of international harmonized intellectual property regimes. For instance, article 33 of the TRIPS Agreement precludes the possibility of patent terms shorter than 20 years, while article 27 makes it hard for national legislators to differentiate between fields of technology for market-related purposes. At the same time, numerous tailoring possibilities are now available to domestic players in the intellectual property arena, which have been explored elsewhere in the literature over the past few decades. Among these tailoring possibilities, the impact of the Federal Circuit—as an agent of de facto tailoring—in the field of biotechnology comes to mind. At a different level—and as an example of legislative tailoring—the pre-America Invents Act non-obviousness provision in the Patent Act expressly carved an exceptional regime for biotechnologies.

Lessons from the Past, however, goes beyond drawing inspiration from the rather blunt policy tools available to Venetian regulators at the dawn of intellectual property regimes. Instead, through her thorough examination of the institutional architecture of Venetian patent law, Fusco invites us to revisit our own regulatory landscape. She reminds us of a feature often overlooked when we tend to the minutiae of patent policy, technology regulation, and the design of incentives regimes: the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) is somewhat of an oddity. And no, for once we are not talking about inter partes review and the patent death squad. But the PTO remains a singular case in the regulatory landscape: an agency with very limited rule-making authority, particularly at the substantive level. It is not the kind of oddity we can/should necessarily do away with, but perhaps we should question it more often.

While building on work by Jonathan Masur on regulatory design, Fusco highlights the sharp contrast between the PTO and agencies with robust rule-making authority, focusing on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). I would add to these the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which often deals with areas of technology that overlap with those of the PTO—and, for that matter, with Venice’s experiments involving heavily regulated industries at the cross-roads between patent protection and trade secrecy. The potential parallels (or lack thereof) between the PTO and the FDA strike me as particularly interesting. Contemporary scholarship has explored the role of the FDA, viewing it not merely as an information gatherer and an information-production catalyst. The PTO, like the FDA, amasses enormous quantities of information on a number of subjects (from drafting techniques to the breadth and specifics of the state of the art in a given industry). Unlike the FDA, however, the PTO’s lack of rule-making authority has prevented the Agency from refining doctrines according the specificities of a given technological field. It has also insulated much of the information accumulated by the PTO from other players in the patent system—namely the Federal Circuit, which has historically been very parsimonious in seeking information from the Agency.

As Fusco reflects on the advantages of giving greater rule-making power—and consequently greater patent-tailoring power—to the PTO, I also see future pathways of inquiry that connect her work with that of Daniel Carpenter on regulatory structures, as well as issues like agency capture and agency-industry relationships.

To this reader, Fusco’s articles on the birth of the patent regime are therefore less of a historical narrative and more of a contemporary reframing of persistent issues in our patent law, policy and regulatory spaces. I think they will be of interest even to those working outside the intellectual property arena—from administrative law to the sociology of innovation. And to those who enjoy drinking out of fine Venetian glass, of course.

A Classical Perspective on Information Ownership

Aug 9, 2019 David FagundesAdd a Comment

It’s not news that normatively fraught debates in legal academia tend to become polarized and then stuck. Scholarship often tends to cohere around preexisting camps, causing debate to focus on which camp (and who within each camp) is right and to ignore the possibility that the available framings may have missed something important. In light of this, one of the most valuable and refreshing moves an article can make is to throw a bomb into the long-accepted binary of a given academic debate by suggesting an entirely new way of thinking about an issue. This is precisely what Jeremy Sheff does to the debate over foundational concepts of information ownership in his fascinating and provocative draft, Jefferson’s Taper.

Here’s the backstory: Some scholars favor a limited vision of information owners’ rights and tend to embrace what has become known as the utilitarian theory¹ of copyright and patent. According to this view, property in creative expression or inventions is not rooted in any notion of “right” other than the state’s positive law. Rather, the state grants monopolies in information only because (and to the extent that) doing so is necessary to incentivize the creation of things that would earn no profits for their owners absent law’s imposition of exclusive rights. Other scholars prefer a more expansive vision of owners’ rights; these scholars tend to advocate an alternative view of copyright and patent rooted in the writings of John Locke. This approach locates a pre-political right to ideas in the labor expended in creating them and rejects the notion that copyright and patent are nothing more than state-created monopolies designed to calibrate the optimal level of creative and inventive production.

Adherents of each side in this debate have produced a wide variety of authorities for each view, but none has been as influential as Thomas Jefferson as expressed in his letter to Isaac McPherson. In that letter, Jefferson uses the metaphor of lighting another’s candle to make a point about the non-rivalrous nature of intangible property: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light, without darkening mine.” (P. 5.) He deployed this example to argue that “inventions … cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” (P. 5.) The Parable of the Taper has become a shibboleth for those who prefer the low-protectionist “utilitarian” view of copyright and patent.

But what if Jefferson meant something else entirely by the Parable of the Taper? This is the tantalizing question that Sheff investigates. He begins by pointing out that in all likelihood Jefferson did not come up with the Parable on his own, but rather borrowed it from Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, who used the same story with slightly different phrasing in his philosophical tract De Officiis. Did Jefferson’s uncited reference to De Officiis suggest that he shared Cicero’s basic approach to property? If so, that may reframe entirely the meaning of the Parable of the Taper, and indeed the common understanding of Jefferson’s position on how to regulate ideas.

We commonly assume that Jefferson is a scion of the Enlightenment and its modern assumption that all persons are created equal. (A proposition that Jefferson adhered to at best in theory not practice, given that he was a slaveowner.) But the pre-Enlightenment Classical tradition of property—which has its roots in Cicero, among other ancients—assumed instead that people are necessarily born unequal. Consequentially, the challenge of law generally, and of property law in particular, is how to allocate rights among people in light of their inequality. Cicero’s view of property in particular was elitist and conservative. It accepted without question preexisting distributions of property and offered arguments about how and why these distributions should be preserved.

Sheff is careful not to argue that his discovery proves that Jefferson adhered wholesale to a pre-modern, Ciceronian worldview on property and equality generally. But he does imagine what it would mean to think about copyright and patent through this lens with provocative results. For one thing, in the passage from which Jefferson borrowed the parable, Cicero discusses the obligation of property owners to engage in acts of beneficence, at least toward those who merit such acts. The point of Cicero’s relating the parable is that he regards the duty of beneficence to be at its zenith when acting generously costs owners little or nothing, as when someone asks to light their lamp with yours. Sheff suggests that this could be read to mean that Jefferson’s view of copyright and patent included the conviction that owners of copyrights and patents had obligations to share the fruits of their intellectual labors with the public. This reading translates the deeply conservative Ciceronian view of property into one that is—in this application, at least—generous and public-spirited.

Sheff’s article is enlightening well beyond the ambitious thesis he seeks to advance. For one thing, his eloquent writing makes the seventy-seven pages of historical and philosophical exegesis read like a pleasure, not a slog. For those of us who know little of the Classical tradition of philosophy, Sheff’s article is a fascinating and useful primer that moves from a deep dive into Cicero to a tour through Aristotelian, Thomist, and Grotian views on property. One criterion for what makes an article worth reading is that in so doing, you learn something new and important. In this sense, Sheff’s work succeeds masterfully.

But how important was Sheff’s discovery? He makes a very strong case that Jefferson borrowed the parable of the taper from Cicero, but extrapolating from use of that one metaphor that Jefferson more generally embraced the Ciceronian worldview on property represents a fairly large conceptual leap. Sheff does not, for example, substantiate this suggestion by citing any other passages from Jefferson’s writing that embrace the Classical approach to property. And while I am no Jefferson scholar, I am fairly confident that there are indications that he instead embraced (again, with astonishing lack of awareness given his ownership of slaves) the modern Enlightenment view that all people are born equal.²

Yet this does not detract from the success of Sheff’s article in light of its major ambition: His piece is best viewed not as a claim about Jefferson’s own beliefs, but as an attempt to breathe life into the sclerotic debate in copyright and patent between low-protectionist utilitarians and high-protectionist Lockeans. In Jefferson’s Taper, Jeremy Sheff invites us to think more broadly about the range of philosophical traditions that may illuminate our understanding of owning ideas, and more generally serves as a reminder of the importance of bringing fresh perspectives to scholarly debates with long-fixed battle lines