Virtual Trade Dress: A Very Real Problem

Abstract

A tragedy looms for trade dress. Encouraged by bad case law and tempted by new technologies, trade dress threatens to assume a role properly reserved for other forms of intellectual property. Trade dress should aim primarily at protecting the public from confusing the features that identify goods and services. Current trends, however, risk expanding trade dress until it constitutes the very commodities that it once merely identified. Superficially genuine but fundamentally artificial, this is virtual trade dress.

Keywords: Trade dress, virtual trade dress, intellectual property, rights in services, trademark, Lanham Act