| New European Community-wide design rights have been introduced to offer further protection for designs throughout the European Community. These design rights are intended not only to offer European wide protection for designs, but also have been defined to significantly broaden the scope of design features and products which are protectable.
Protection under the new regime is available by a Registered Community Design and/or by Unregistered Community Design Right.
The Registered Community Design offers the more substantial protection, as it provides the exclusive right to use the registered design, and also any other design which produces on the informed user the “same overall impression”, for up to 25 years.
To be registrable the design must be new, and must have individual character, i.e. it must not afford the “same overall impression” to an informed user as an existing publically available design. There is also a 12 month grace period, such that disclosures by the designer in the 12 month period prior to applying for a Registered Community Design will not affect its novelty.
The Unregistered Community Design Right offers less substantial protection, this being limited to 3 years protection against actual copying (rather than independent design).
There are a number of advantages of these European design laws over previous design laws. Firstly, the protection offered under previous design laws related to a specific product or article, whereas the emphasis of protection is now the design itself. For example, in the context of a Registered Design, a design was previously registered in respect of a particular article, say a vase, so that protection only extended to the design as applied to that vase. Now, it is the design itself that it is protected, regardless of the article to which it is applied.
Secondly, the features of a design which are protectable have been extended under these design laws. Thus, whereas the features of a design which were previously protectable were limited to one or more features of “shape, configuration, pattern or ornament”, features including the lines, contours, colours, shapes, texture and/or materials of the product or its ornamentation are now protectable, thereby significantly increasing the scope of protectable subject matter.
A final advantage is that of cost. The Registered Community Design provides an extremely cost effective vehicle for securing registered design protection throughout Europe. Also, as multiple applications are permitted, if a number of designs for similar products require protection at the same time then they can be filed together in a single application, saving further on costs.
For more details on design rights and on all aspects of patent and trademark issues, contact Steven Suer at Ablett & Stebbing on +44 (0)20 7935 7720 or email at info@absteb.co.uk.
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