Each issue of the Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property (QMJIP) contains one article which is not only available to subscribers but which is also offered at no charge to anyone who would like to read it.  The most recent issue, which has only just been published, carries an article by Australian scholar Chris Dent, "Confusion in a legal regime built on deception: the case of trade marks".

The law of trade marks is, now, reliant on the notion of ‘confusion’ between marks for the purposes of denying registration and of assessing infringement. Yet, this area of law is founded on the notion of deception – in the nineteenth century, a plaintiff had to show that the infringing mark would deceive consumers. This article takes a broad, socio-legal, approach to explore the factors that contributed to the introduction of ‘confusion’ into the legal discourse. These include the creation of the registration system itself; developments in the case law around the notion of ‘deception’, the breakdown of the rigidities in the law and the changes in how the system ‘saw’ the individual. This latter development involved the rise of utilitarianism, the acceptance of the ‘internal life’ of individuals and their possession of (potentially wrong) knowledge.

You can read the article in full by clicking here.