Trade dress: The increasing importance of an ancient yet new form of intellectual property protection

Abstract

Trade dress is a means of identifying and differentiating the product of a vendor by visual (and very occasionally auditory) cues of a form other than written language. The use of trade dress certainly goes back into pre-Roman times, and was very likely used well before then. Trade dress remains important in societies both highly literate and substantially illiterate, and in some respects has increased in importance in both.