Legal Protection For Trade Dress

Trade dress is the object of an emerging intellectual property about productappearance, packaging design, service appearance, sales techniques, etc. from goodsor services providers. It is different from other intellectual property although they areinterrelated. The existing intellectual property laws do not apply to that trade dressthat do not belong to copyright, trademark and patent rights. Trade dress is protectedby trademark of likelihood of confusion in U.S. Trade dress must have distinctive andnon-functional in order to protect by law. The distinctive means the ability ofindicating commercial origin. The non-functional is order to balance the interests oftrade dress owners and public. Trade dress has not been identified by laws in ourcountry. Provisions of law about trade dress are few and scattered. But it is more andmore prominent of legal protect about trade dress in practice.The paper is divided into four parts.The first part is introducing the outline of trade dress; elaborate the conception,features and elements of trade dress, and comparative analysis of trade dress andother intellectual property rights.The second part is the theoretical basis of legal protect about trade dress,analysis the legitimacy of legal protect of trade dress from natural rights, andelaborated the theory of foreign legal protection of trade dress, and analysis therelations between trade dress protection and freedom competition.The third part is about trade dress infringement identified, and analysis of theperformance of trade dress infringement, components and exception.The fourth part discuses the improvement of legal protection of trade dress inChina. Anglicizing the theories of three modes of trade dress protection, and givesome legislative proposals about it.