The Interplay of Product Definition, Design and Trade Dress

In the present Essay, I discuss some of the roles played by trademark law in stimulating competition among producers to develop new varieties of products and services. I argue that trademarks perform a particularly useful role in engendering innovation, and that this role was, for a time, threatened by the particular approach to genericity followed by the Ninth Circuit in its well-known Anti-Monopoly 1 decisions. I also argue that the developing law of trade dress performs a different, but nonetheless complementary, role in encouraging innovation