Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 280

529US1

Unit: $U38

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OCTOBER TERM, 1999

205

Syllabus

WAL-MART STORES, INC. v. SAMARA BROTHERS,
INC.

certiorari to the united states court of appeals for
the second circuit

No. 99–150. Argued January 19, 2000—Decided March 22, 2000

Respondent Samara Brothers, Inc., designs and manufactures a line of
children’s clothing. Petitioner Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., contracted with a
supplier to manufacture outﬁts based on photographs of Samara gar-
ments. After discovering that Wal-Mart and other retailers were sell-
ing the so-called knockoffs, Samara brought this action for, inter alia,
infringement of unregistered trade dress under § 43(a) of the Trademark
Act of 1946 (Lanham Act). The jury found for Samara. Wal-Mart then
renewed a motion for judgment as a matter of law, claiming that there
was insufﬁcient evidence to support a conclusion that Samara’s clothing
designs could be legally protected as distinctive trade dress for pur-
poses of § 43(a). The District Court denied the motion and awarded
Samara relief. The Second Circuit afﬁrmed the denial of the motion.

Held: In a § 43(a) action for infringement of unregistered trade dress, a
product’s design is distinctive, and therefore protectible, only upon a
showing of secondary meaning. Pp. 209–216.

(a) In addition to protecting registered trademarks, the Lanham Act,
in § 43(a), gives a producer a cause of action for the use by any person
of “any . . . symbo[l] or device . . . likely to cause confusion . . . as to the
origin . . . of his or her goods.” The breadth of the confusion-producing
elements actionable under § 43(a) has been held to embrace not just
word marks and symbol marks, but also “trade dress”—a category that
originally included only the packaging, or “dressing,” of a product, but
in recent years has been expanded by many Courts of Appeals to encom-
pass the product’s design. These courts have correctly assumed that
trade dress constitutes a “symbol” or “device” for Lanham Act purposes.
Although § 43(a) does not explicitly require a producer to show that its
trade dress is distinctive, courts have universally imposed that require-
ment, since without distinctiveness the trade dress would not “cause
confusion . . . as to . . . origin,” as § 43(a) requires.
In evaluating distinc-
tiveness, courts have differentiated between marks that are inherently
distinctive—i. e., marks whose intrinsic nature serves to identify their
particular source—and marks that have acquired distinctiveness
through secondary meaning—i. e., marks whose primary signiﬁcance,
in the minds of the public, is to identify the product’s source rather than