Abstract
This chapter concludes on the main findings of the book. Further, this chapter suggests that the Court of Justice plays a more active role in shaping the average consumer by adjusting the law and policy underpinning the average consumer to apply the average consumer more consistently and coherently. As for the contextualisation, the General Court and national courts should clarify the inconsistencies, and particularly, the Nordic judiciaries should make the role of the average consumer in confusion-based disputes more explicit.
This chapter claims that the inconsistencies of the average consumer in European trademark law through a feedback loop may dynamically impact the state of the law and the market by impacting the relevant stakeholders. The stakeholders include the Court of Justice, General Court, national courts, trademark owners and their competitors.
A way forward to clarify the policy underlying the average consumer, is for the Advocates General to include more explicit trademark policy into their opinions that, if the opinions are confirmed by the Court of Justice, will create a more solid policy foundation for the court’s decisions. In this context, the economic function of trademarks as lowering consumer search costs could be considered to create a better policy steer guiding the contextualisation of the average consumer.
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Notes
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- 4.
- 5.
Ibid, Sect. 4.3.1.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
Ibid, Sect. 10.2.4.
- 15.
Ibid, Sect. 10.3.
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- 17.
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- 28.
- 29.
Anecdotally, the author of this book has heard from an employee at the EUIPO that this presumption has its origin in a presentation made by an expert on consumer behaviour. Several members of the CJEU allegedly attended the presentation.
- 30.
- 31.
Dinwoodie, Graeme B., ‘Trademarks and Territory: Detaching Trademark Law from the Nation-State’, Houston Law Review, vol. 41/no. 3, (2004), pp. 885, p. 889-890 (italics added).
- 32.
- 33.
- 34.
The focus of Gibson’s article is how the grey areas of intellectual property law, including trademark law, will expand licensing markets of senior right owners due to risk aversion among competitors. In sum, the feedback loop in trademark law is described as: First, that if a trademark is unlicensed by the senior trademark owner, “use is likely to cause confusion among consumers as to whether the mark owner produced, sponsored, or approved of the goods.” Second, to be on the safe side, junior users of trademarks will seek a license from the senior owner, even if unnecessary. Third, as a “norm,” consumers will become used to seeing an expanding practice of licensed trademarks. “And what consumers view as the norm becomes the norm because consumer perception is trademark law’s touchstone.” Gibson, James, ‘Risk Aversion and Rights Accretion in Intellectual Property Law’, the Yale Law Journal, vol. 116 (2007), pp. 882, p. 907-908. Generally, on trademark law, ibid, p. 907-927.
- 35.
- 36.
Altia v. Arctic Beverage Group, TOSLO-2017-52797, [2018]. NODC, p. 7.
- 37.
- 38.
Ibid, Sect. 1.3.1.
- 39.
- 40.
Fhima, Ilanah, ‘Introducing Reality into Trade Mark Law’, Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, vol. 9/no. 8, (2014), pp. 1, p. 3.
- 41.
Ibid, p. 4.
- 42.
See Grynberg, Michael, ‘Trademark Litigation as Consumer Conflict’, New York University Law Review, vol. 83/no. 1, (2008), pp. 60, p. 83.
- 43.
See ibid, p. 87.
- 44.
Gibson, James, ‘Trademark Law as an Agency Problem’, (2015 (an unpublished draft is with the author of this book)), p. 1.
- 45.
- 46.
- 47.
- 48.
- 49.
- 50.
- 51.
See Laustsen, Rasmus D., ‘An Economic Analysis of EU Trademark Law; the Role of the Average Consumer in Trademark Infringement between Two Confusingly Similar Trademarks’, in Lyngsie, Jacob, Mortensen, Bent O. G. and Østergaard, Kim eds., Rets- og Kontraktøkonomi: Law & Economics an Anthology (Djøf Publishing, 2016), 37, in particular p. 47-53.
- 52.
Laband, David N., ‘An Objective Measure of Search Versus Experience Goods’, Economic Inquiry, vol. 29/no. 3, (1991), pp. 497, p. 498. Laband has presented a similar view in terms of classifying search and experience goods in two extreme categories. However, Laband’s classification does not consider that credence goods are logically further away from search goods since even higher search costs are incurred on credence goods than on experience goods by consumers when obtaining information on the goods.
- 53.
Darby, Michael R., and Karni, Edi, ‘Free Competition and the Optimal Amount of Fraud’, Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 16/no. 1, (1973), pp. 67, p. 311-312, p. 313.
- 54.
Economides, Nicolas, ‘The Economics of Trade Marks’, Trademark Reporter, vol. 78 (1987), pp. 523, p. 531. Examples of such products are washing machines, refrigerators, television sets and HiFi equipment.
- 55.
Darby, Michael R., and Karni, Edi, ‘Free Competition and the Optimal Amount of Fraud’, Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 16/no. 1, (1973), pp. 67, p. 68-69, Redmond, William, ‘Three Modes of Competition in the Marketplace’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 72/no. 2, (2013), pp. 423, p. 429 and Posner, Richard A., ‘Economic Analysis of Law’, (9th edn, Aspen, 2014), p. 121. Redmond refers to certain services of a technical nature as credence goods, including certain legal, medical and repair services. Posner refers to cars as examples of credence goods. According to Darby and Karni, the purchaser of credence goods will not have a different experience after having purchased the goods. The quality of credence goods may not be assessed until after a longer post sale time has passed.
- 56.
See particularly, Laustsen, Rasmus D., ‘An Economic Analysis of EU Trademark Law; the Role of the Average Consumer in Trademark Infringement between Two Confusingly Similar Trademarks’, in Lyngsie, Jacob, Mortensen, Bent O. G. and Østergaard, Kim eds., Rets- og Kontraktøkonomi: Law & Economics an Anthology (Djøf Publishing, 2016), 37, p. 51-53.
- 57.
Examples of well-known e-commerce platforms are eBay and Amazon.com. Examples of the use of trademarks for online information search are search engines (like Google), user generated content (such as TripAdvisor, Trustpilot and PriceRunner).
- 58.
- 59.
Posner, Richard A., ‘Rational Choice, Behavioral Economics, and the Law’, Stanford Law Review, vol. 50 (1997-1998), pp. 1551, p. 1559.
- 60.
- 61.
Posner, Richard A., ‘Rational Choice, Behavioral Economics, and the Law’, Stanford Law Review, vol. 50 (1997-1998), pp. 1551, p. 1559.
- 62.
Towfigh, Emanuel V. and Petersen, Niels, ‘Economic Methods for Lawyers’, (1st edn, Edward Elgar, 2015), p. 18.
- 63.
Corbin, Ruth M., ‘The Moron in a Hurry – a Creature of Law Or Science?’, in Archibald, Todd L. and Echlin, Randall Scott eds., Annual Review of Civil Litigation 2015 (1st edn, Carswell, 2015), 43, p. 56.
- 64.
Ibid, p. 58-61.
- 65.
Weatherall, Kimberlee, ‘The Consumer as the Empirical Measure of Trade Mark Law’, Modern Law Review, vol. 80/no. 1, (2017), pp. 57, p. 85-86. Weatherall seems to respond to Dinwoodie and Gangjee who also refer to similar “quick and dirty” approaches that could “have limited predictive value in the real world.” Dinwoodie, Graeme, and Gangjee, Dev, ‘The Image of the Consumer in EU Trade Mark Law’, in Leczykiewicz, Dorota, and Weatherill, Stephen eds., The Images of the Consumer in EU Law: Legislation, Free Movement and Competition Law (1st edn, Hart, 2016), 339, p. 365.
- 66.
Weatherall, Kimberlee, ‘The Consumer as the Empirical Measure of Trade Mark Law’, Modern Law Review, vol. 80/no. 1, (2017), pp. 57, p. 85.
- 67.
Paco Underhill, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping: Updated and Revised for the Internet, the Global Consumer and Beyond (1st ed. 2009), p. 24.
- 68.
Ibid, p. 25.
- 69.
In 2009 Underhill stated that grocery studies had shown that 60-70 % of all grocery purchases in supermarkets were unplanned. Ibid, p. 105.
- 70.
- 71.
Besides the findings by Underhill, inspiration for this observation came, when the author of this book had an enlightening talk with marketing professor Lisa R. Szykman on this book project. Confronted with the trademark law’s focus on consumer confusion, Szykman intuitively responded that consumers in a retail setting do not reach the stage where they are confused (or likely to be) in the cognitive sense of the word. See also Chap. 6, Sect. 6.6.4.
- 72.
- 73.
In Danish: “appellerer vel nærmest til smilet hos den dommer, der har varemærkerne liggende som henholdsvis bilag A og bilag B, og som naturligvis ikke kan undlade at lægge dem ved siden af hinanden. Har han imidlertid gjort det blot i den brøkdel af et sekund, som det tager at opfatte mærkerne, vil store dele af de procederende advokaters argumentation om ligheden eller forskelligheden mellem mærkerne prelle af på ham.” Koktvedgaard, Mogens, ‘Konkurrenceprægede Immaterialretspositioner: Bidrag til Læren om de Lovbestemte Enerettigheder og Deres Forhold til den Almene Konkurrenceret’, (1st edn, Juristforbundet, 1965), p. 179.
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Laustsen, R.D. (2020). Putting the Average Consumer into Perspective. In: The Average Consumer in Confusion-based Disputes in European Trademark Law and Similar Fictions . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26350-8_12
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