Research On Conditions For Trade Dress Protection According To Anti-Unfair Competition Iaw

The trade dress is exotic, which has not appear in China’s laws. It is an inclusive trademark which is different from traditional commercial trademarks. Starting from the initial protection, landscaping, marketing and other functions, the trade dress gradually has sources recognition function through using which is the same as trademark. Like trademarks, in essence it works as a symbol to play a role of information exchange in the market and trade dress can bring a variety of benefits to the whole market so it is necessary to protect trade dresses in accordance with conditions by law in order to maintain market order, to protect the reputation of producers and to prevent other producers from free-riding. Improving the protection system of trade dress, the first thing should be clarifying the protection conditions of trade dress as well as specific identifying methods, among which protection conditions of trade dress refer to the dividing line to classify the trade dresses with or without protection as well as tools to adjust the strength of protection.With the principle of adhering to sources of recognition function and in accordance with the relevant provisions and theatrical analysis on the Trademark Law,the unfair competition conditions of trade dress are significant, non-functional, prior and legal, among which Legitimacy and priority can be easily identified and may be applied according to the relevant provisions of the Trademark Law and Significance includes the intrinsic significance and acquired significance. In American judicial practice, different significance standards are applied based on the different types of trade dresses, which, however, is not fully unified in the United States. Due to the differences of protectionprotection of trademarks and trade dress in entities and procedures, they have different requirements on the significance. For the intrinsic and acquired significance, trademarks can be allowed to register as long as they acquire any one of them and then be protected by law. However, trade dress must obtain significance in order to achieve requirements of identification function protection. Non-functional property is a specific restriction of protection condition of trade dress as a commercial logo, which mainly focuses on avoiding conflicting between trade dress protection and the Patent Law and consideration of competitors protection. The functionality is divided into practical and aesthetic functionality, in which practical functionality can be divided into facts and legal functionality. The scope of practicalfunctionality Functional should be considered for functionality identification, and the lack of consideration of aesthetic functionality will not damage the interests of competitors.Through combing laws and regulations as well as typical cases involving trade dress protection in China, it is found that protection conditions of trade dress identification in China’s judicial practice mainly includes well-known commodity,unique and non-functional property. The protection conditions of trade dress protection in China have the following problems and drawbacks: First, the application of the expression "well-known commodity" is likely to cause the misplace of protected objects and lead to the results of judging Heroes from background; second,there is overlapping and redundancy in conceptoncept between the conditions of "well-known" and "unique" property; third, the provisions on non-functional trade dress in China’s legislation can not meet the development needs of the market economy and of judicial practice, with evasive expressions of objects of regulation.To solve these problems, the first thing should be establishing the legal concept of trade dress, then thoroughly replace "well-known commodity" and "unique" condition with "well-known" property and finally clearly defining the restrictions of non-functional, legal and prior property.