Just Laugh it Off: Trademark Parody and the Expansion of User Rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article proposes the expansion of user rights to trademark law in Canada with reference to other jurisdictions’ approach to the parody of trademarks. Fair dealing user rights in copyright cover a range of allowable purposes under the Copyright Act. The case of parody is perhaps the clearest way to illustrate the need for expanded intellectual property user rights for trademarks. Trademark parody demonstrates how recognizing specific rights for users of trademarks would assist in delineating the limits of owners’ rights and in limiting encroachment on freedom of expression, and would take greater account of the broader public interest beyond just the “consumer shortcut” role of a mark. The extension of user rights into this domain would encourage further balance between the public interest and public domain and the protection of creators’ and owners’ rights. This article seeks to consider parody as fair dealing or fair use, review the current legal framework in Canada and abroad, understand the rationale for extension of these rights, and propose appropriate changes to the current trademarks regime, including potential amendments to the legislation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".