TradeDress: Facts You Need To Know

Trade Dress is arguably the least known and talked about intellectual property. However, it’s properties are just as important in protecting work as any other. From Louis Vuitton’s red soles to T-Mobile’s distinct purple color, trade dress protects companies most distinct and unique features of products and logos. Here are five facts to help you understand what trade dress is really all about.

1.) In order to have protection through a trade dress, “The trade dress must be inherently distinctive, unless it has acquired secondary meaning.”

2.) For a trade dress to acquire secondary meaning, consumers must widely associate the subject of the trade dress with the company, like the purple color of T-Mobile.

3.) “For trade dress to be considered inherently distinctive, one court has required that it ‘must be unusual and memorable, conceptually separable from the product, and likely to serve primarily as a designator of origin of the product.'”

4.) The Trade Dress also protects an items packaging in the sense that nobody else can use it.

5.) The shape of the Coca-Cola bottle is actually considered distinct and holds secondary meaning and is therefore protected under trade dress.