Trademarks Worth a Thousand Words: Freedom of Expression and the Use of the Trademarks of Others
Bibliographic record
Abstract
English Abstract:Trademarks play an important role in facilitating critical speech in an increasingly corporate capitalist society. Not only do they serve as markers for expressive content on the Internet, they can also be used as vehicles for the communication of critical messages about the trademark owner or its products or services. In this paper, the author examines the implicit balance in the Trade-marks Act between freedom of expression values and trademark rights, and argues that it is being significantly altered by the contemporary push for greater trademark protection. The author identifies specific problems that emerge from Canadian case law relating to freedom of expression and trademark law. These include the treatment by courts of intellectual property rights as private property rights, inattention to the trademark/copyright overlap, the troublesome distinction between commercial and non-commercial uses, and the phenomenon of trademark bullying. The author argues for a sharp evolution in Canadian case law that would establish clear parameters for critical speech using trademarks.French Abstract: Les marques de commerce jouent un role important dans l’expression des perspectives critiques dans notre societe capitaliste et corporative. Elles sont non seulement utilisees pour trouver le contenu critique sur l’internet; elles peuvent aussi etre employees comme vehicule elles-memes des messages qui critiquent le proprietaire de la marque de commerce ou ses produits ou services. Dans cet article l’auteur examine l'equilibre implicite dans la Loi sur les marques de commerce entre la protection des marques et la liberte d’expression. Elle identifie des problemes specifiques souleves par la jurisprudence canadienne dans le domaine. Ceux-ci incluent le traitement des droits de propriete intellectuelle comme propriete privee; l’inattention au chevauchement entre le droit des marques de commerce et le droit d’auteur; la distinction problematique entre les emplois commerciaux et non commerciaux; et le phenomene des poursuites abusives. L’auteur maintient qu’il est necessaire d’etablir, sans tarder, une jurisprudence qui etablit des parametres clairs pour l’expression critique par voie des marques de commerce.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".