Today’s News Roundup—February 5, 2025

Application Period Opens for INTA’s Open Innovation Challenge

The INTA Open Innovation Challenge (OIC) is now accepting applications from early-stage to mid-stage start-ups and early-stage scale-ups to showcase their business ideas, technological innovations, or research applications.

Applicants will present their projects to a distinguished panel of judges, who bring extensive expertise in branding, brand valuation, and business advisory services; intellectual property law; marketing; the investing principle of environmental, social, and governance (ESG); and finance. Participants will gain invaluable insights and have opportunities to network with fellow entrepreneurs and innovators.

Finalists will be announced on April 24, and the final round of judging will take place on May 18 at the 2025 Annual Meeting in San Diego, California, USA.

We’re asking everyone to promote the IOC within their communities and encourage eligible business owners and entrepreneurs to apply. Applicants can apply here through March 14, 2025.

~ Cezara Talmaci, Coordinator, Content Development and Operations, INTA, Mexico

Congratulate Our High-Performing Committee Members!

INTA is pleased to announce the list of committee members selected in December 2024 for the Recognition of High-Performing Committee Members Program. As part of a continuing initiative to identify and celebrate high-performing committee members, this program enables committee chairs, vice chairs, and staff liaisons to acknowledge and highlight the contributions of outstanding committee members who have significantly advanced committee work during the term.

Through this program, committee leaders can express their appreciation for the personal time and effort these members have devoted to achieving and furthering the committee’s objectives. These individuals received early access to registration for the 2025 Annual Meeting and were celebrated by their committees.

Please join us in congratulating and thanking our high-performing committee members!

~ Randi Mustello, Chief Governance Officer, INTA, USA

AI Theme Issue of The Trademark Reporter Available Now

The latest issue of The Trademark Reporter is devoted to artificial intelligence (AI). Whether one sees AI as mostly hype or as a change as seismic as the smartphone, there is no doubt that AI will evolve and improve, fundamentally changing one’s professional and private lives in ways one can only begin to imagine. The preeminent authors of the articles in this curated collection describe the present relationship between AI and trademarks (and complementary IP) and explore what the future may bring to this emerging and evolving area of the law.

The articles range from the groundbreaking, “AI and the ‘Death of Trademark’” by Michael Grynberg (DePaul University, USA), in which the author imagines an AI assistant able to make product choices for consumers, and posits that trademarks will take a lesser role in product selection, perhaps even becoming superfluous, to the data-rich “Large Legal Fictions: Profiling Legal Hallucinations in Large Language Models” by Matthew Dahl (Yale University, USA), Varun Magesh (Stanford University, USA), Mirac Suzgun (Standford University, USA), and Daniel E. Ho (Stanford University, USA), in which the authors point out that hallucinations are inevitable as the AI model tries to maintain fidelity to the training corpus, the user’s prompt (which may assume incorrect information), and the law itself, three areas that may be in conflict.

~ Willard Knox, Editor-in-Chief, The Trademark Reporter, INTA, USA

Although every effort has been made to verify the accuracy of this article, readers are urged to check independently on matters of specific concern or interest.

© 2025 International Trademark Association