KESTENBAUM: I wasn't going to let that stop me. So I called up a trademark expert, Mark McKenna at Notre Dame, and I asked him, is this right? Can someone just waltz in and grab a hundred­year­old trademark, suddenly own this whole history? It seemed a little weird 'cause a trademark is like a kind of property. And if you think of this like land...

SMITH: Like, hey, I notice you haven't mowed your lawn for a while, so I'm just going to take a little part of your property.

KESTENBAUM: Yeah, it seems crazy, right? McKenna said, I'm thinking about trademarks wrong. They're a funny kind of property.

MARK MCKENNA: So the idea is that, you know, trademarks are not property in a full sense like other things. So trademark rights really exist for the purpose of helping producers signal something to consumers that, you know, we are the source of this product.

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