UH Law Center Associate Dean Greg R. Vetter (IPIL/Houston) and Lee Eubanks (Eubanks PLLC and Houston Intellectual Property Law Association President) join guest speaker James Gibson (Richmond School of Law) during the 29th Annual Fall Lecture.
Dec. 09, 2022 — An intellectual property law expert examined some consequences for trademark law dissociating the connection between reputation and quality during the 29th Annual Fall Lecture hosted by the University of Houston Law Center’s Institute for Intellectual Property & Information Law (IPIL) this November. The Fall Lecture is sponsored by the Houston Intellectual Property Law Association (HIPLA).
James Gibson, the Sesquicentennial Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law, served as the lecture’s guest speaker with his presentation on “Uncoupling Trademark & Reputation” given at The Houston Club downtown.
As part of the talk, Gibson discussed how the quality of a company’s goods and services, as expressed by trademark law, is only one input into a company’s reputation. He cataloged the impacts of other reputational inputs such as product ratings, advertising, marketing and influencers, all of which are commonly used with increasing distortion.
Gibson, founder and former director of the University of Richmond Law School’s Intellectual Property Institute, is an accomplished scholar and is frequently quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Law Journal, Slate and Chronicle of Higher Education.
