Trade Dress & Dupe Culture
The Colours on the Corner
A corner shop, a sportswear giant and the stripe pattern they both wanted to own.
New · AI & Copyright
How Much Does a Copyright Win Cost?
A $1.5 billion settlement priced as a rounding error, a detection tool that cannot reliably detect and what happens when both are announced in the same week.
Top Stories
Your Face & Your Voice
The Smile That Belonged to Someone Else
Deepfakes, personality rights and what happens when your face appears in places you have never been.
Luxury & Brand Identity
The Cost of a Flower
How Louis Vuitton's flower ended up on a bubble tea cup and what happened when the lawyers noticed.
Luxury & Brand Identity · Podcast Coming Soon
While Waiting for My Birkin
A parody Birkin, an unamused Hermès and whether making people laugh is a defence in trademark law.
Coming Soon
The Obiter Dictum Podcast
Two episodes are in the edit: Hermès and the parody bag, and Louis Vuitton and the tea chain. They arrive on Spotify shortly, and every episode will live here alongside its companion article.
From the Archive
Trade Dress
Who Owns an Octagon?
How Audemars Piguet lost the legal right to its most famous design, and why a $400 pocket watch might be the smartest response.
Dupe Culture
Does It Matter If Nobody Is Fooled?
How dupe culture broke the one thing trademark law needs to work, and why the courts are struggling to keep up.
AI & Liability
Can ChatGPT Tell You What's Wrong?
A bank holiday, an eleven-year-old's phone call, and a wrongful death lawsuit about the only second opinion available.
AI & Liability
Who's Liable When the Chatbot Lies?
A grieving passenger, a fabricated refund policy and Air Canada's discovery that its own chatbot was legally binding.