When a company wants to protect the appearance or configuration
of a product, trade dress intellectual property protection most
immediately comes to mind. This is sensible. But, other types of
protection, copyright and design patents, can each provide their
own unique advantages.
Trade Dress: Perpetual Protection
Trade dress rights provide protection for product appearance and
configuration when those attributes have come to identify the
source of the product. The types of product attributes that trade
dress rights cover is extremely broad. Color, sound, even smell can
all be protected as a trade dress. Trade dress rights, however, are
difficult to obtain and provide limited remedies for enforcement.
In the case of product configurations, trade dress is not
considered to be inherently distinctive, thus trade dress can only
be registered upon proof of secondary meaning i.e., that the
relevant consuming public has come to associate that shape, color,
sound, or smell
