"Lululemon Dupe": Rethinking Brand Protection in the Age of Dupe Culture
“Dupe culture” has become a consumer movement built around affordable imitations of premium products, with influencers posting side-by-side comparisons under hashtags like #LululemonDupe, which has amassed over a billion views on TikTok. Rather than simply fighting the phenomenon, Lululemon has also sought to engage with the language consumers use to describe products that imitate its offerings.
Double Standard for Double Patenting
Benjamin Rosen, Sam Kwiatkowski
After In re Cellect and Allergan v. MSN provided guidance on the administration of obviousness-type double patenting in view of patent term adjustments, the doctrine’s next question has been asked. Can an obviousness-type double patenting rejection rest on the risk of harassment alone, even when no patent term is being extended? The USPTO’s Appeals Review Panel says it can, and the Federal Circuit is poised to decide the question in In re Ablynx.
Pastel Pints and Crimped Crusts: What's New in Trade Dress Law
The past few months have been sweet for trade dress plaintiffs. This summer, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York issued a significant decision in Van Leeuwen Ice Cream LLC v. Rebel Creamery LLC, No. 1:21-cv-02356. The court found that Rebel Creamery intentionally copied Van Leeuwen’s distinctive ice cream packaging trade dress and awarded $23.785 million in disgorgement of Rebel’s profits. Just a month later, J.M. Smucker fended off Trader Joe’s partial motion to dismiss Smucker’s federal dilution claim concerning the fame of design marks associated with Smucker’s “Uncrustables” products in J.M. Smucker Company v. Trader Joe’s Company, No. 5:25-cv-02181 (N.D. Ohio). Together, the cases illustrate the markedly different showings required at the pleading and trial stages, while also underscoring the importance of defining the asserted trade dress and developing evidence of distinctiveness, recognition, confusion, and nonfunctionality.
Patent Due Diligence in the AI Era
Artificial intelligence is reshaping patent practice from two directions at once. New patents covering machine learning and related technologies are issuing at a pace of tens of thousands each year, steadily enlarging the body of rights a company developing AI products may need to account for in assessing patent infringement risk for new product releases.
At the same time, AI-assisted tools have transformed the work of mining those patents and measuring them against a product in development, helping to compress weeks of analysis into days. The same technology that is filling in the patent landscape is making that landscape far easier to see.
August 2026 Intellectual Property Report Recap
In case you missed it, here is a link to our August 2026 Intellectual Property Report.
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