Professor Christine Haight Farley quoted in a Bloomberg Law article on Commodores Entertainment Corp. v. Thomas McClary
September 15, 2023
Professor Christine Haight Farley quoted in Bloomberg Law article on Commodores Entertainment Corp. v. Thomas McClary the latest case in a long-running legal dispute between former band members over the name “The Commodores”. This trademark case put the Supreme Court ruling in Abitron Austria GmbH v. Hetronic International Inc. to the test.
According to Prof. Farley:
The appeals court could have addressed legal questions raised by the high court during the fourth appeal in the nine-year case but declined to wade into any analysis, said intellectual property law professor Christine Haight Farley of American University. Instead, she said, it sent the case back to district court to apply new legal precedent with “no guardrails.”
“It seems like the Eleventh Circuit totally punted, saying, ‘We think it would be best if the district court tried this out first,’” Farley said. “This is what we expected, because Abitron was so narrowly written by the majority. The majority tried so hard not to appear to be writing a new rule that it didn’t explain how to apply the decision at all.”