ObiterDictum.

The Archive

Articles

Everything published so far, grouped into collections. Each piece stands entirely on its own; the collections simply reward the reader who follows the thread.

Three pieces on how luxury houses are defending their brand identity across jurisdictions and legal doctrines. All three stories — Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Hermès — now have companion podcast episodes on Spotify and YouTube.

Part One · Louis Vuitton · July 2026

The Cost of a Flower

How Louis Vuitton's flower ended up on a bubble tea cup and what happened when the lawyers noticed.

Read on Substack   Listen to the podcast episode   Watch the video episode

Part Two · Chanel · July 2026

Someone Else's Buttons

Upcycled luxury, exhausted rights and the line between creative reuse and trademark infringement.

Read on Substack   Listen to the podcast episode   Watch the video episode

Part Three · Hermès · July 2026

While Waiting for My Birkin

A parody Birkin, an unamused Hermès and whether making people laugh is a defence in trademark law.

Read on Substack   Listen to the podcast episode   Watch the video episode

Three pieces on the gap between owning something and the world agreeing that you do, told through a name, a shape and a word.

Part One · The Name · September 2026

What Happens When Netflix Takes Your Name?

How the most-watched film in Netflix history turned a 25-year-old band into a search result for someone else’s cartoon.

Read on Substack   Listen to the podcast episode   Watch the video episode

Part Two · The Shape · May 2026

Who Owns an Octagon?

How Audemars Piguet lost the legal right to its most famous design, and why a $400 pocket watch might be the smartest thing the brand has ever done about it.

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Part Three · The Word · October 2026

Can Patagonia Own a Pun?

How a pun, a drag queen and a $1 lawsuit are testing whether trademark law can tell the difference between appreciation and infringement.

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Three pieces on a deceptively simple question: who owns your face, your voice, and the identity behind them?

Part One · June 2026

The Face on the Box

Dua Lipa, a Samsung TV box and the $15 million lawsuit that turned on a single word: yes.

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Part Two · July 2026

The Sound of Yourself

Taylor Swift, trademark law and what happens when you try to register a human voice as a brand.

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Part Three · July 2026

The Smile That Belonged to Someone Else

Deepfakes, personality rights and what happens when your face appears in places you have never been. A synthetic Preity Zinta, 275 links and the Bombay High Court's answer.

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Three standalone articles on what the law says about artificial intelligence, across copyright, patents and data rights.

Part One · May 2026

The Copyright Question

Thaler v Perlmutter, section 9(3) of the CDPA, and the question nobody at work is asking: if you used AI to write that report, who owns it?

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Part Two · May 2026

The Patent Question

Two UK Supreme Court decisions, two years apart, pulling in different directions on what a machine can invent.

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Part Three · May 2026

The Data Question

Getty Images against Stability AI, three jurisdictions at three different stages of resolution, and who controls data once it leaves the hands of the person it belongs to.

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Five pieces on the oldest fight in intellectual property: what makes a copy a copy, and when does the law decide it has gone too far?

Trade Dress · July 2026

The Colours on the Corner

A corner shop, a sportswear giant and the stripe pattern they both wanted to own.

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Dupe Culture · May 2026

Does It Matter If Nobody Is Fooled?

How dupe culture broke the one thing trademark law needs to work, and why the courts are struggling to keep up.

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Trademark · June 2026

Is a Cross Just a Cross?

How a symbol two thousand years old ended up registered as somebody's trademark and what a department store did about it.

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Trade Dress · May 2026

Who Owns the Shape of a Sandwich?

A billion-dollar peanut butter and jelly empire, a Trader Joe's knockoff with suspiciously similar crimped edges, and whether you can trademark a lunchbox staple.

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Trade Dress · May 2026

Can You Own the Shape of a Moisturiser Jar?

How a $48 body cream, a Costco dupe and a federal judge's views on the practicality of roundness produced one of the most consequential trade dress rulings in years.

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Copyright · May 2026

The Real Price of a Valentine's Card

Pop-up greeting cards, three-dimensional paper sculptures, and what a copyright dispute reveals about the cost of making beautiful things.

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AI & Liability · October 2026

Can ChatGPT Practice Law?

A workplace injury, a chatbot that told her to fire her lawyer and the first federal lawsuit asking whether an AI can be guilty of practicing law without a licence.

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AI & Liability · September 2026

Could Matching Your Skin Tone Be Considered Discrimination?

How a beauty loyalty programme, 13,000 arbitration demands and a self-reported skin colour field produced a question California law has never had to answer before.

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AI & Liability · August 2026

Why Won’t It Read?

Terms of service, training data and the legal question that falls outside of the framework.

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AI & Liability · May 2026

Can ChatGPT Tell You What's Wrong?

A bank holiday, an eleven-year-old's phone call, two doctors arguing in a kitchen, and a wrongful death lawsuit that asks what happens when the only second opinion available is a chatbot.

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AI & Liability · June 2026

Who's Liable When the Chatbot Lies?

A grieving passenger, a fabricated refund policy and Air Canada's discovery that its own chatbot was legally binding.

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Two pieces on the machinery of doing business — the public registers, the corporate veils and the distribution structures that quietly govern who owes what to whom.

Commercial Law · August 2026

The Boot Maker's Bargain

Public registers, limited liability and the wonderful career tool that costs nothing and takes less than an hour to use.

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Commercial Law · June 2026

The Shoes That Outgrew the Shop

Selective distribution, surplus stock and what happens when a brand decides it no longer needs you.

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AI Governance · September 2026

A Tamagotchi for Grown-Ups

What consumer and privacy law can see, and what it still cannot, when a data-hungry AI agent arrives wearing a friendly face.

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AI Governance · September 2026

No …. We Have Reg 10

How a regulation most people have never heard of and a financial free zone roughly the size of Canary Wharf are producing the world's first regulatory certification for the people who oversee AI.

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AI & Copyright · July 2026

How Much Does a Copyright Win Cost?

A $1.5 billion settlement priced as a rounding error, a detection tool that cannot reliably detect and what happens when both are announced in the same week.

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Public Law · June 2026

Who Gets to Be a Terrorist?

The Court of Appeal says Palestine Action is nothing like the suffragettes. The suffragettes might disagree.

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