As the newly crowned NCAA basketball national champions make their media rounds, you might think that NIL is just about athletes getting paid to play. But NIL is a legal concept that encompasses an individual's right of publicity and allows all individuals, not just student-athletes, to control and profit from the commercial use of their identity NIL, short for Name, Image, and Likeness, has grown far beyond endorsement deals for athletes. It’s about the core pieces of your identity: your name, your face, your voice, and the ways you present yourself to the world. In a digital world where anyone can build an audience (or be impersonated by AI), those things have real value for everyone. On March 26, 2026, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) launched a new resource page that centralizes guidance on navigating name, image, and likeness in connection with trademarks and related intellectual property issues. This is a helpful first stop for understanding how branding an

Many wineries understand the importance of protecting their brand names through trademark registration and enforcement in the market, but producers should not overlook protection that may be available under U.S. trademark law for distinctive elements of product packaging and design. Considering trade dress within your overall intellectual property enforcement strategy will allow you to protect the unique aspects of presentation that make your product stand out on crowded market shelves. Trade dress is a type of trademark encompassing elements of product packaging and design which, taken together or separately, indicate to consumers that a product or service originates from a particular source, and which distinguish goods of one producer from those of its competitors. It is the look and feel of a product or service in the marketplace, and may consist of elements like size, shape, color, imagery, and decorative aspects of packaging. Trade dress must either be inherently distinctive or ha