Legal Protection For Trade Dress

Trade dress is a concept imported from abroad, it can be left to the public perception of theoverall image of a specific or a combination of appearance, from a variety of elements, which isused to distinguish it from other goods, services, businesses, commercial activities, etc. In modernsociety, trade dress of recognition has become increasingly important, these significant and non-functional trade dress condensate together with the creative work is intangible, in Europe, Britain,Japan and other developed countries, trade dress are subject to full legal recognition and protection.Although China’s current intellectual property laws provide part of legal protection for the tradedress in our existing legal system, but such protection is not complete and systematic. As aneffective complement to traditional intellectual property law system, unfair competition law is thebest choice for trade dress protection. This paper describes the status of national legal protection oftrade dress, and on this basis, systematic exposition of how to understand and improve our anti-unfair competition law trade dress protection combined with the status quo of China’s legislature.This paper is divided into three parts, including the introduction, the main thesis and conclusion,the main thesis consists of four chapters.The first chapter,"trade dress Overview". The first part of this chapter, detailed list of thediscussion about the concept of trade dress, and an analysis of the nature of trade dress. The secondpart lists and analyzes the type of trade dress which includes product dress, service dress andcorporate dress. The third part compares and analyzes the differences of trade dress, trademarks,designs, works, packaging and decoration.The second chapter,"domestic and international legal protection of trade dress". States,regions or the World Organization of trade dress protection is divided into two major areas ofprotection of intellectual property law and the Anti-Unfair Competition Law in the paper. In somecountries or regions, trade dress protection can be based on different conditions, respectivelyprotected by copyright law, patent law, trademark law, intellectual property law. However, in some countries or regions in line with the trade dress of the Trademark Law can be registered as atrademark, trademark laws, and cannot be registered as a trademark by the Anti-Unfair CompetitionLaw protection. At the end of the chapter, compare these two fields to adjust the way of trade dress,and thus that in our country, it is suitable using Anti-Unfair Competition Law to protect trade dress.The third chapter,"investigate the conditions of trade dress protection". This chapter, thejurisprudence of the United States as an example, combing significant conditions and non-functional conditions of trade dress protection of United States, significant is divided into inherentdistinctiveness and acquired significant, the functionality is divided into the fact functionality andaesthetic functionality. The two parts of this chapter discusses content of the significant and non-functional and the way to judge.The fourth chapter,"improve the protection of China’s trade dress". The first part of thischapter discusses the likelihood of confusion of the trade dress infringement identified conditions,mainly discusses the confusion of the classification and judgment. In the second part, on the basisof the analysis of inadequate protection of trade dress from the Copyright Act, Patent Law,Trademark Law and Anti-Unfair Competition Law, we proposed an idea about how to learn fromforeign law and improve China’s Anti-Unfair Competition Law of trade dress.