Research On The Legal Protection Of Trade Dress

Trade dress is the visual image of goods or services and covers aspects such as trade marks,packaging and decoration,advertising,etc.Traders initially used trade dress for decorative purposes,to beautify goods or services.With the increasing number of competitive operators in the market,it has become difficult to reflect the overall characteristics of the goods or services with a trademark that is primarily a source identifier,thus limiting the expression of the distinctiveness of the goods or services.When a trade dress is applied for trademark registration,it is important to conduct a proper and reasonable examination,in particular to determine its distinctive and non-functional elements.Rather than an itemised list of the scope of trade dress,this model provides for relatively broad object elements,which are supplemented by new jurisprudence in a timely manner,taking into account the actual trial work.It is the timely nature of the wide-breadth protection,case law countries have fewer and fewer gaps in the law,but also more relevant to the actual needs of market competition.As a codified country,the need for non-enumerated broad-bore protection of trade dress is also discussed in this article.In the context of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law,the focus is on protecting the competitive value of a commodity’s distinctive packaging,décor and overall business image as a bottom-up protection rule in the intellectual property law system.However,the Anti-Unfair Competition Law,which was originally intended as a touted protection,still presents certain difficulties in its practical application.China’s current law has no specific regulation of trade dress protection,trade dress is not easy to obtain trademark registration,and the Anti-Unfair Competition Law is in urgent need of further refinement of specific legal provisions.This thesis starts from sorting out the basic concept of commercial appearance,and analyses the problems in the protection of commercial appearance in the existing sectoral laws,such as the time lag in the protection of the Trademark Law,and the defects in the scope of protection in the enumerated legislation.In response to these problems,this thesis conceptualises the protection of trade dress from the perspective of China’s national conditions and the relevant overseas legislation,and conceives a protection concept that meets the realistic needs of trade dress protection and covers a wide range of areas.The thesis proposes its own views on how to improve the Trademark Law and the Anti-Unfair Competition Law and emphasise the cooperation between them,With regard to the narrow scope of the existing trade dress registration,it is recommended that the scope of the objects protected by the Trademark Law be expanded,the boundary between non-functional and distinctive elements be clarified and,finally,the relevant rules of application of Article 6 of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law be refined,with a view to optimising the legal protection of trade dress in China.