On The Legal Protection Of A Significant Mark

The distinctiveness of trademark is of highly importance and core issue to theTrademark Law. The protection of acquired distinctiveness of trademark is an importantissue of Trademark Law both theoretical and practical. At present, the trips and the parisagreement has this issue ruled, and the acquired distinctiveness of trademark has beenadmitted by most of the countries. In China, there are more and more cases about theprotection of acquired distinctiveness of trademarks, but the theoretical research is muchweaker compared to the practical cases. Therefore, this thesis become meaningful as itanalyses the legal protection issue of significance of trademarks.This thesis has analyzed the scope of application and identification standard of theacquired distinctiveness of trademarks by virtual of explanation, comparison researchand cases analysis. As to the legislation and legal practice of this issue, the thesis hasanalyzed the issue and offered some advice compared with foreign practice.This thesis can be divided into four parts:The first part is the general overview of acquired distinctiveness of trademarks.This part has mainly talked about the definition,classification and identification ofacquired distinctiveness of trademarks, as well as the understanding of “the secondmeaning”and the theoretical basis.The second part has introduced the foreign research on the acquired distinctivenessof trademarks. This part mainly took U.S.A., E.U.,and other countries like Japan, Spainas example, introduced their legislation and legal practice on this issue, compared towhat we did and find out the experience that we can follow.The third part is about the problems existed in the protection of acquireddistinctiveness of trademarks in our country. This part focus on finding the problemsstart from the present legislation and legal practice. As to the scope of application, thethesis mainly analyzed general name, single color logo, geographical name and the issuewhether we can obtain the distinctiveness from the trade dress. Also, this part tried toidentify the time standard and other factors that need to be considered to define theacquired distinctiveness of trademarks.The final part suggested how to improve the protecting scheme of acquireddistinctiveness of trademarks. This part offered reasonable advice about the scope ofapplication, identification standard based on the research on existed problems, and theintroduction of foreign legal scheme.