Supreme Court of the United States · 2000-03-22
Case and law context
Role: rule-announced; posture: Supreme Court review of trade-dress verdict; product-design distinctiveness rule announced, judgment reversed and remanded without resolving acquired secondary meaning.; result: remanded; claim:
Instances and excluded annotation blocks
| Case | Element | Holding and scope | Variant | Exact source quotations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| /us/529/0205-01 — Supreme Court of the United States · 2000 | Enforceable source-identifying mark or trade dress | not_reached Excluded from merits counts rule-announced / merits theory: Children clothing design, not product packaging; subject: theory=Children clothing design, not product packaging The facts identify the claimed design and copying, not evidence that source significance was proved. The Court rejects inherent distinctiveness as a route for product design; it does not hold that Samara lacks secondary meaning. IR protective OCR is preserved verbatim. | product-design/secondary-meaning-required | Its primary product is a line of spring/summer one-piece seersucker outfits decorated with appliques of hearts, flowers, fruits, and the like.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_529.jsonl#/us/529/0205-01; Unicode character offsets [408:550] (end exclusive); SHA-256 04d0a14e0adf40434cbe489319e3ffe940079e3cdafd4be9acddf124f2b21c49.Wal-Mart sent Judy-Philippine photographs of a number of garments from Samara’s line, on which Judy-Philippine’s garments were to be based; Judy-Philippine duly copied, with only minor modifications, 16 of Samara’s garments, many of which contained copyrighted elements.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_529.jsonl#/us/529/0205-01; Unicode character offsets [945:1215] (end exclusive); SHA-256 04d0a14e0adf40434cbe489319e3ffe940079e3cdafd4be9acddf124f2b21c49.We hold that, in an action for infringement of unregistered trade dress under § 43(a) of the Lanham Act, a product’s design is distinctive, and therefore protective, only upon a showing of secondary meaning.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_529.jsonl#/us/529/0205-01; Unicode character offsets [17416:17623] (end exclusive); SHA-256 04d0a14e0adf40434cbe489319e3ffe940079e3cdafd4be9acddf124f2b21c49.The judgment of the Second Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_529.jsonl#/us/529/0205-01; Unicode character offsets [17624:17750] (end exclusive); SHA-256 04d0a14e0adf40434cbe489319e3ffe940079e3cdafd4be9acddf124f2b21c49. |