Ensuring Consumers 'Get What They Want': The Role of Trademark Law

This article has been adapted (with updating) from the third Annual Herschel Smith Lecture on Intellectual Property Law delivered by Professor Dinwoodie at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge in May 2008.  It   considers how trademark law should interpret the commitment in legislative history to the 1946 (US) Lanham Act that one of the principal purposes of trademark law is "to protect the public so that it may be confident that, in purchasing a product bearing a particular trademark which it favorably knows, it will get the product which it asks for and which it wants to get". It looks back to highlight the often under-appreciated role of the consumer protection rationale in recent expansions in trademark protection, and then considers the different ways by which that basic objective might now be pursued by trademark law. It concludes that, without disregarding the core consumer protection purpose of trademark law, we need to start viewing the question of ensuring consumers get what they want both with a broader view of consumer interests and more explicit attention to a wider array of values.