It’s clear from our Adventures in Copyright series (especially the Marc by Marc near exact replica we posted yesterday) that designers have little protection when it comes to their designs. For American designers to protect their patterns, they must attain “trade dress” protection, which means consumers recognize a knockoff as coming from a particular designer like say, a wrap dress from DVF. This is pretty hard to prove and designers rarely win these cases.

It’s a frustrating position for American designers to have little recourse when their designs are copied down to the most subtle details but a new bill gives designers some hope. Late last night, the New York Times broke the news that New York Senator Charles E. Schumer introduced a bill called the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act which would provide “very limited intellectual property protection to the most original design.” So if Marc Jacobs wanted to sue whomever knocked off his bag, he’d have to prove that that his design is a “unique, distinguishable, non-trivial and non-utilitarian variation over prior designs,” and that the knock off is “substantially identical” to the original.

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