Prof. McClanahan Lee Featured on Ipse Dixit Podcast To Talk About Color Trademark Article

Ipse Dixit, a legal scholarship podcast, recently featured Professor McClanahan Lee and his co-author, Deborah Gerhardt from the UNC School of Law, to discuss their forthcoming article, “Owning Colors,” which will be published in the Cardozo Law Review. The article explores how different disciplines contend with understanding color as a signifier and addresses the extent to which colors may be capable of serving as commercially distinctive trademarks. Through two original empirical studies, McClanahan Lee and Gerhardt demonstrate that although consumers use color in ways that may merit trademark protection, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has applied a variety of doctrines to greatly limit the number of color marks that are successfully registered.