The Legal Protection Of Our Country Commercial Appearance

As a representation logo to the goodwill of business operators, trade dress is aholographic and overall impression showed by products and services. It includesfour types, which are the dress of the product itself, the dress of productpackaging, and the dress of service and the dress of web pages. For the legalprotection of trade dress is concerned, whose core is to prohibit those unfaircompetitive behaviors of copying other operators’ trade dress, which in essence istaking advantage of others’ goodwill, with the yardstick of the “likelihood ofconfusion” rule. In addition, in order to protect the public interest and balance thelegal system of patent law and trademark law, those trade dress protected by lawshall not be functional. For the present trade dress legal system in China, it hastwo characteristics: on one hand, it can basically offer a degree of protection forthe majority types of trade dress through different ways, for example "theanti-unfair competition law, and those special intellectual property law such astrademark law, the design patent of patent law, and copyright law; On the otherhand, it also has some form and content defects which are in need of improvement,for the form, the status the related law is too low; for the content, there is a"famous" threshold and webpage dress and product design can’t be protected bythe Unfair Competition Law.Under the support of the above system understanding, this paper is divided intofour parts as follows:The first part is about the general situation of the trade dress legal system. Itmainly introduces the definition of trade dress, and the relationship betweenfreedom and imitation. In the definition of the part, after introducing the relateddefinition in American law and some Civil Law countries, and connecting withthe international intellectual property treaty and the related files, at last come tothe this paper’s definition of trade dress. Secondly, different forms of trade dressare discussed--product design, product packaging dress, service dress and web sitedress. Finally, it expounds the relationship between trade dress protection and thefreedom of imitation. The second part is the study of the relationship in trade dress, trademark, andgoodwill. From the original trademark sense, trade dress is just a form oftrademark, but according to the fact of China’s trademark law, some differencesare indeed between the two: range, stability and differences in infringementdetermination.The third part is about two important aspects of trade dress: the determination ofthe infringement and exception principle illustrated. The author insists that the"likelihood of confusion" is the unique principle of infringement judgement, andthere are also some factors can be considered in this process. Secondly, afteranalysing the general principles, the paper insists that the protection of trade dressshould follow the requirement of "non-functional".The fourth part is based on the analysis of China’s trade dress legal system. Thispart is divided into two steps: the first step is to comb China’s existing relevantlaws, and the conclusion is that our country’s existing legal system can basicallyprotect the majority of the different types of trade dress; The second step is to putforward the author solutions to the existing relevant defects.