commercial law

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Trade dress is the distinctive presentation of products or services covering visual aspects such as color and configuration. One of the most famous trade dresses is the design of the Coca-Cola bottle. Another one is the shape and exterior features of the Testarossa and the Daytona Spyder models of Ferrari. Lastly, in Ciba-Geigy Corp. v. Bolar Pharmaceutical Co., Ciba-Geigy Corporation sued for infringement on its trade dress for the color and shape of its pills.
A person name can acquire secondary meaning when it so synonymous with a certain product or service in the public domain to warrant being trademarked. An example is the Jordan brand of shoes made by Nike and associated with former basketball player Michael Jordan.
Even though deep linking passes off the content of the website that is linked into as that of the linker, I don’t think it is trademark infringement. The World Wide Web is designed to allow linking to any content on the internet. Furthermore, URLs are not copyrightable (Bray 2). Lastly, most court rulings state that under the US law, deep linking is not trademark infringement, the most widely cited is Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.
I don’t think framing should be considered an infringement. Just like deep linking, the US copyright laws in large part don’t hold framing to be infringement (the United States Patent and Trademark Office) Framing simply creates a pointer to lead a user’s browser to the content creator’s server and into their webpage, which is not a direct reproduction or distribution.

Moreover, framing has no basis for liability since the copyright-protected content is hosted on the proprietor’s servers and not the framer’s.
Works Cited
Bray, Tim. “Deep Linking” in the World Wide Web, TAG Finding. Antarctica Systems, 2003.
United States Patent and Trademark Office, Apr. 0548, www.uspto.gov/.