The Tension between the Patent Act and the Lanham Act in the US -- Taking the Trade Dress Protection for Product Configuration for Example

DOI

10.2991/icsshe-18.2018.82How to use a DOI?

Keywords

trade dress protection, product configuration, Patent Act, Lanham Act

Abstract

For many years, many courts have been confused about the question of whether trade dress protection under the Lanham Act can be applied to product configuration in an expired utility patent. Some courts insisted that if the product configuration is nonfunctional, it could obtain trade dress protection. While the Tenth Circuit held that if the product configuration comprising a “significant inventive component” of a previous utility patent, then trade dresses protection is not available to it, no need to consider its functionality. After that, the district court refused to use the functionality analysis, a bright line test was given by the district court that allowing, “slavish copying” of the “best mode” of a patent. The courts have been spilt with regard to this issue. This essay is trying to present the limited trade dress protection can be given for production configuration in an expired utility patent, so the Patent Act and the Lanham Act can be reconciled to some extent.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Wei Zhang
PY  - 2018/09
DA  - 2018/09
TI  - The Tension between the Patent Act and the Lanham Act in the US -- Taking the Trade Dress Protection for Product Configuration for Example
BT  - Proceedings of the 2018 4th International Conference on Social Science and Higher Education (ICSSHE 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 337
EP  - 340
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icsshe-18.2018.82
DO  - 10.2991/icsshe-18.2018.82
ID  - Zhang2018/09
ER  -