UH Law Professor Aman Gebru Examines How Trademarks Can Mislead Consumers

June 23, 2026 — University of Houston Law Center Assistant Professor Aman Gebru recently discussed his forthcoming article, “Truthmarks,” on Professor Brian Frye’s “Ipse Dixit” podcast. The article, which is scheduled for publication in the American University Law Review in Spring 2027, examines the role of truthfulness in trademark law.

During the interview, Gebru explored the gap between trademark law’s stated consumer-protection goals and how the system operates in practice.

Gebru, who teaches contracts and intellectual property law courses, writes on issues involving intellectual property, innovation, branding, and creative expression, including frameworks for communal creativity, cultural intellectual property claims, and the public’s perception of trademarks.

Trademark law is traditionally justified as a mechanism to protect consumers from confusion caused by dishonest competitors. As Gebru explained in the interview, however, the law largely ignores trademark owner’s deceptive conduct of their own consumers even though trademarks function as signals consumers relies on when making marketplace decisions.

In the article, Gebru identifies three ways trademark law permits, and sometimes incentivizes, misleading conduct by mark owners.

1. “Masking,” which allows firms to retain trademark rights even as the products associated with a mark materially change, or to change trademarks in the face of negative public reaction, while offering the same underlying product.
2. “Zombie marks,” in which abandoned trademarks with lingering goodwill are revived by unrelated companies to benefit from residual goodwill or notoriety.
3. “Nonsense marks,” in reference to marks composed of arbitrary strings of letters or numbers that easily secure registration while offering little meaningful information about product origin.

During the podcast, Gebru emphasized that these practices undermine consumer reliance and threaten the functioning of the trademark system itself. If trademarks no longer serve as trustworthy indicators of source or consistency, consumers may rationally discount them altogether.

Rather than advocating for a whole new regulatory regime, his article proposes reforms within trademark law. Gebru calls for a heightened truthfulness requirement achieved by recalibrating existing doctrines. This includes abandonment, failure to function as a mark, the duty of candor, and consumer standing.

Together, these changes aim to realign trademark protection with its core purpose: maintaining reliable communication between producers and consumers.

To listen to the podcast click here.

Gebru’s full article is available here:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6536638