The Law Offices of Melissa K. Dagodag

11/03/2026

Beyond the Boutique: How Luxury Brands Are Turning IP Into Destinations
Luxury brands are no longer stopping at products, they are building branded worlds through hotels, spas, restaurants, cruises, and other immersive experiences that let consumers live inside the label. As fashion and hospitality grow closer, intellectual property becomes the backbone of the model, shaping everything from licensing and brand standards to marketing content and cross-border enforcement. The real challenge is not simply expanding into these spaces, but doing it in a way that protects the brand while turning experience itself into a long-term asset.

10/29/2026

AI’s Hidden Shield: Why Trade Secrets Matter More in the AI Race
Trade secrets are becoming a critical part of AI protection strategy because patents and copyrights do not fully cover many valuable aspects of AI systems, especially where patentability and copyrightability limits leave key innovations exposed. That makes nonpublic assets such as system design, training approaches, and other proprietary know-how increasingly important to protect through secrecy rather than disclosure. The catch is that trade secret protection is only as strong as the safeguards behind it, and AI-specific risks like prompt injection, model distillation, and emerging transparency rules can quickly weaken that protection if companies are not careful.

10/27/2026

AI in Advertising Is Moving Fast, Compliance Is Racing to Keep Up
Brands have moved from telling agencies to avoid AI to demanding that they use it faster, and that shift is pushing advertising teams into a new phase where legal compliance matters just as much as creative speed. The biggest pressure points are now disclosure rules, digital replicas, copyright ownership, training data, and privacy risks tied to AI-driven targeting. What makes the moment especially challenging is that regulators are not moving in sync, so advertisers are dealing with a patchwork of developing rules across jurisdictions. The businesses best positioned for this next phase will be the ones that build strong internal guardrails now, with human oversight, clear documentation, and tighter contract controls across the creative supply chain.

10/22/2026

When Secrecy Beats Disclosure: Why Trade Secrets Are Back in Focus
As innovation shifts toward algorithms, data, manufacturing know-how, and internal processes, trade secrets can offer longer-lasting protection than patents, provided companies take reasonable steps to maintain confidentiality. The strongest IP strategy often combines both approaches, using patents for inventions that can be reverse engineered and trade secrets for the operational knowledge competitors cannot easily see or copy.

10/13/2026

Tiger King Copyright Fight Ends With a Fair Use Win for Netflix

Netflix secured a significant copyright victory after the Tenth Circuit held that its use of a 66-second funeral video clip in Tiger King qualified as fair use. The ruling is especially notable because the court, applying the Supreme Court’s Warhol framework, made clear that a secondary work does not have to directly comment on the original to support a fair use defense. The decision also reinforces the broader protection available to documentary filmmakers when limited third-party footage is used for a distinct storytelling purpose. As a result, Whyte Monkee Productions, LLC v. Netflix, Inc. stands out as an important post-Warhol ruling on fair use in nonfiction content.

10/08/2026

A Smart Trademark Search Can Save a Brand Before It Launches

A strong trademark strategy starts long before filing, and the real value of a search lies in spotting conflicts early enough to avoid expensive rebranding, legal disputes, and wasted marketing spend. The key is to go beyond a quick knockout search and look at registered marks, common law use, business names, domain names, and relevant jurisdictions if cross-border expansion is in play. Similarity in sound, appearance, meaning, and commercial impression can matter just as much as an identical match, which is why search results need careful legal and commercial analysis. In practice, the businesses that search thoroughly and document the process are usually in a far better position to file with confidence.
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Trademark searching is the process of identifying existing trademarks that might conflict with your proposed…

10/02/2026

Cross-Border AI and IP Rules Are Moving Apart, Not Together

AI is exposing major differences in how jurisdictions handle intellectual property, with China appearing more willing to protect AI-generated outputs when meaningful human input exists, while the UK and EU remain centered on originality and human authorship, and the U.S. continues to analyze these issues through human contribution and fair use. The bigger concern is that uncertainty around training data and agentic AI still leaves ownership, liability, and proof of human involvement unsettled, so businesses operating internationally need stronger governance, employee education, documentation, and technical controls to manage risk.
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09/30/2026

Early U.S. AI Training Rulings Offer Support for Fair Use, but Not a Blank Check

The first U.S. court decisions on AI training suggest that using copyrighted works to train generative AI models may qualify as transformative fair use in some situations, particularly where the material is used for machine analysis rather than for direct human consumption. At the same time, these rulings do not close the door on claims by authors and other creators, because courts are still grappling with unresolved issues such as market harm, indirect competition from AI-generated content, and whether future disputes will push the market toward licensing or compensation-based solutions.
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Artificial intelligence systems that generate text, images, music, and code are trained on vast amounts of existing material. Inevitably, much of…

09/24/2026

Trade Dress Protection Faces Real Limits in the Dupe Economy

The Apollo v. Sol de Janeiro decision is a reminder that trade dress can be a powerful brand-protection tool, but it will not shield packaging features that courts view as functional rather than source-identifying. In knocking out the claimed trade dress, the court treated the product design elements as serving practical purposes and gave significant weight to prior USPTO functionality refusals, underscoring the need for brands to align prosecution, enforcement, and broader IP strategy instead of relying on trade dress alone.
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Can trade dress protection keep pace with the dupe economy? As look‑alike products proliferate and skirt traditional counterfeiting rules, trade…

09/19/2026

Fashion’s IP Playbook in the U.S. Is Still a Patchwork

Protecting fashion goods in the United States requires brands to mix and match copyright, trademark, trade dress, design patent, and utility patent rights, because there is still no single, comprehensive federal regime for fashion design protection. Copyright usually does not cover the overall shape or cut of garments, but trademarks and trade dress can protect names, logos, colors, patterns, and product features that signal source, while design patents and utility patents may help with ornamental elements or genuinely new functional innovations. AI adds another layer of risk, because purely AI-generated designs and marketing materials may fall outside copyright protection unless there is enough original human creative input.
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This Q&A covers the types of intellectual property protection and procedures for fashion goods in USA.