I am Rolf Claessen and my co-host Ken Suzan and I are welcoming you to episode 178 of our podcast IP Fridays! Today’s interview guest is Caitlin Byczko, who is partner with Marnes & Thornburg in their IP team. Ken is discussing dupe culture with her. Here is the profile of Caitlin Byczko https://btlaw.com/en/people/caitlin-byczko But before we launch into this very interesting interview, I have some news for you: On August 10th, 2026, Navitas Semiconductor filed suit against Renesas Electronics in the Eastern District of Texas, accusing Renesas of infringing four US patents on gallium nitride semiconductor technology through its SuperGaN product lines. The filing follows a countersuit Renesas brought on July 22nd, 2026, accusing Navitas and two of its employees of misappropriating trade secrets. It shows how patent disputes and trade secret claims between competitors are increasingly being fought on multiple fronts at once, and often as tit for tat. It also emerged on August 12th, 2026, that an EPO Board of Appeal had dismissed an appeal by Atlas Global Technologies and ruled that its WiFi patent, EP 3 353 901, case T 1230/25, could not be maintained in any form at all, even though the original opponents, TP-Link and Vantiva, had already withdrawn their oppositions. That knocked out the basis for several parallel infringement suits at the Unified Patent Court, which were then withdrawn. For suppliers and implementers, the takeaway is that fighting a patent held by a non-practising entity can still be worth it, even once the original opponent has thrown in the towel. On August 10th, 2026, the Unified Patent Court in The Hague fully revoked Maxell’s patent EP 2 061 230, covering technology for handing off content to a second device, and at the same time dismissed Maxell’s infringement claim against several Samsung entities, in cases UPC_CFI_251/2025 and UPC_CFI_769/2025. The judges found the patent to be nothing more than an obvious combination of routine adaptations, with no additional technical effect. And now – let’s hear the interview with Ken and Caitlin! A dupe used to be a quiet, slow thing. You’d stand in the cereal aisle, notice the generic box next to the name brand, buy it, tell a friend. Word spread over months. That world is gone. On this episode of IP Fridays, Ken Suzan sat down with Caitlin Byczko, partner at Barnes & Thornburg LLP in Indianapolis, to talk about what’s replaced it: a TikTok-driven economy where a single video can sell out a dupe product within hours, sometimes before the original brand’s own team even knows it exists. Byczko litigates and prosecutes trademarks across retail, fashion, luxury goods, technology, and pharmaceuticals, and she’s watched dupe culture evolve from a marketing footnote into one of the more active battlegrounds in trademark law. Here’s what she told us, and why it matters even if your brand has never heard the word “dupe” used about it. Counterfeit and Dupe Are Not the Same Thing, Legally Byczko opened with what she called the most important distinction in this entire conversation: the difference between a counterfeit and a dupe. A counterfeit uses someone else’s actual trademark. Think of a fake Chanel bag stamped with the interlocking C’s, or a fake Louis Vuitton logo. That’s straightforward infringement, and above certain thresholds, a federal crime. A dupe is different. It mimics the look, feel, or performance of a product without using the name or the logo at all. Elf Cosmetics, Zara, Costco’s Kirkland brand, and Quince have all built parts of their business on exactly this model. No one is pretending to be Chanel. They’re offering something that looks and performs similarly, at a fraction of the price, under their own name. Media and social media use “dupe” and “counterfeit” interchangeably. Legally, that’s sloppy, and it matters, because the two categories trigger completely different legal analyses. If There’s No Logo, What Are Brands Actually Suing Over? This is where trade dress comes in. Trade dress protects the overall look and feel of a product: packaging, color combinations, shape, label design. Byczko pointed out that most of us interact with trade-dress-protected products every day without realizing it. The test is likelihood of confusion. Courts look at how similar the products actually look, how sophisticated the shoppers are, and whether there’s real evidence that people were confused. Byczko flagged one case as a genuine roadmap for this area: Van Leeuwen v. Rebel Creamery, an ice cream trade dress dispute that came out of the Eastern District of New York. In her view, the strength of that case came down to how precisely the brand defined its trade dress for the packaging. That precision, she said, did a lot of the work toward the outcome. She’s also watching Lululemon v. Costco, which she expects to be significant partly because it doesn’t rely on trademark and trade dress alone. Byczko noted that brands are increasingly stacking causes of action together: trademark, patent, false advertising, all pointing at the same product. And she’s tracking Sol de Janeiro v. Macau Beauty, a case she finds notable because it pulls in influencer content and testimonials as evidence, not just packaging and trade dress claims. Macau Beauty, she noted, has already been sued multiple times across different jurisdictions. A note for readers outside the US: trade dress as a distinct doctrine doesn’t exist as such in Germany. The closest tools here are the three-dimensional trademark and, more practically, the wettbewerbsrechtlicher Nachahmungsschutz under Section 4 No. 3 of the German Act Against Unfair Competition (UWG). That provision protects product shape, packaging, and get-up against imitation when the original has wettbewerbliche Eigenart, competitive distinctiveness, and the copy creates avoidable confusion about origin, unfairly exploits the original’s reputation, or was built on dishonestly obtained know-how. It’s a narrower, more fact-specific tool than US trade dress, but the underlying logic Byczko describes, define your product’s distinctive features early and precisely, applies just as much on this side of the Atlantic. Why the Evidence Problem Changed Everything Ken asked what’s actually driving the current wave of disputes, and Byczko’s answer was simple: evidence. Ten or twenty years ago, if you sent a cease-and-desist letter or went to trial, you had almost nothing concrete to show about how consumers actually perceived two products. Now you have TikTok comment sections, influencer testimonials, and entire genres of “dupe content” documenting exactly what shoppers think, in their own words, in real time. In the Sol de Janeiro case, Byczko noted that part of the complaint isn’t just about packaging and trade dress. It’s about what influencers said, what claims they made, and what that content reveals about actual consumer confusion or the absence of it. That’s evidence litigators simply didn’t have access to a decade ago, and it cuts both ways: it can prove confusion, or it can just as easily prove there wasn’t any. Why Dupes Took Off: Economics, Status, and a Generational Shift Byczko was careful to frame this part as her personal read, not a sociologist’s conclusion, but it’s a read shaped by watching these disputes up close. Part of it is straightforward economics. Gen Z is shopping under real affordability pressure, and dupes let them participate in trend cycles without the price tag. Byczko cited a projected $12.6 trillion in Gen Z spending power by 2030, a generation too significant for brands to write off. The other part is cultural. A generation ago, owning a visible logo was the status symbol. Now, for a lot of younger shoppers, being the savvy one, the person who finds the dupe first and tells their followers about it, carries its own status. It’s less “I have the real thing” and more “I outsmarted the markup.” Byczko also pointed to growing public skepticism toward paying five or ten times more for a product purely because of the name on the packaging, particularly in beauty and fashion. The PR Trap: When Enforcement Backfires One of the sharpest points in the conversation was about what happens after a brand decides to enforce. Suing over a dupe can read very differently in public than it does in a courtroom. Byczko put it directly: going after a dupe can easily look, to the public, like a big corporation coming down on a small competitor, or worse, on its own customers, the same people who made the original brand aspirational in the first place. She’s seen this dynamic play out repeatedly in high-profile cases. Her advice: treat enforcement as a communication strategy, not just a legal one. Sometimes the smarter move isn’t a lawsuit at all. It’s a quieter cease-and-desist letter, a takedown request, or doubling down on marketing that explains what actually makes the original worth the price. Charlotte Tilbury has leaned hard into this approach, building campaigns around the idea that the original simply can’t be remade. Olaplex ran a similar play with its “OlaDupe” campaign. Legal and marketing, Byczko said, have to work together on this, not in sequence. What Brands Should Actually Do Byczko laid out three practical layers, all before litigation ever enters the picture. First: register your trademarks, and where a product design is genuinely distinctive, pursue trade dress or design patent protection early, before a dupe exists and before you know whether the product will even take off. That timing problem is real. Brands rarely know in advance which product will become the one worth copying. Her advice was to look at long-standing anchor products, the ones that have quietly c
