Protection of industrial and other designs has developed as a distinct and important area of intellectual property law. This book, while providing a solid foundation on the law regarding the protection and enforcement of design rights, focuses on the ever-present, and always contentious, issue of functionality in the context of design rights. While there is considerable harmonization on the fundamental principle that design rights regard aesthetic appearance and not underlying technical function, courts and legislatures the world over have long struggled with determining whether to permit, and how to interpret the scope of, designs rights directed at products whose appearancemay, partially or completely, be the result of functional consideration. This detailed country-by-country analysis provides clarity, insight, and guidance on the legal issues and practical implications of functionality in key jurisdictions worldwide. This book was developed within the framework of the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (AIPPI), a non-affiliated, non-profit organization dedicated to improving and promoting the protection of intellectual property at both national and international levels. The authors of the country chapters have been carefully selected based on their extensive experience and in-depth knowledge about design protection in their respective jurisdictions. Each chapter considers such issues and topics as the following: • availability of protection – granting authority, statutory requirements, drawing requirements, and disclaimers; • tests or approaches applied to determine whether a design right is ineligiblefor protection based on functionality grounds, including related policy considerations; • strategies employed to mount, and fend off, challenges to design rights based on functionality; • determination of a design right’s scope of protection, including the impact of any visual elements of the overall design having appearances that are non-novel and/or functional; • tests or approaches applied to determine whether a visual element of a design right is excluded from the overall scope of protection based on functionality grounds, including related policy considerations; • examples of how visual elements of a design right whose appearance is driven by function are treated in infringement and validity contexts. Each chapter includes case law examples, hypothetical fact patterns, and graphic images of designs to bring issues to life. An introductory chapter covers the basic tenets of design rights, terminology, and discussion of design rights in relation to other areas of intellectual property. As a comparative law study and a collection of contributions from around the world on an important and controversial field, this book proves to be of tremendous practical interest for the industry involved and for the public. Applicants for design protection, parties involved in or contemplating enforcement proceedings, and interested legal practitioners will benefit greatly from its thorough comparative analysis and guidance. It is also exceptionally valuable as a matchless and thorough resource for academics and researchers interested in the international harmonization of intellectual property law.

This book is a revised and updated edition of a major work first published in 2001 under the auspices of the Intellectual Property Committee of the International Bar Association. As a comparative cross-jurisdictional analysis of the practice, theory, scope, and types of design protection, it will continue to be of immeasurable value to lawyers and others involved in industrial design. Industrial designs are particularly interesting because the laws in many countries attempt in different ways to find a balance between protection for the artistic creation and the freedom to use the purely functional, and between the proprietary rights of the creator and the public domain rights of the competitor. The third edition is comprised of twenty-five country reports, each written by one or more prominent intellectual property lawyer(s) in the country covered. To facilitate cross-jurisdictional comparison, each report is structured according to the following sequence of topics: new developments in each jurisdiction; conventions and legislation; definition of what constitutes a protectable design; originality /novelty; duration of protection; infringement; defences to infringement; procedures for filing application for registration; and expunging, cancelling, or varying registration. Prominent new developments covered in the third edition include new chapters from South Korea, Russia and Turkey as well as continuing coverage of the impact of the European Community Design Directive, the adoption of the Hague Agreement with corresponding major changes to US and Canadian design law and practice, the newly revised Japanese Design Law, and China’s revised Guidelines for Examination. Each jurisdiction’s currently applicable legislation, regulation, and case law is summarized and analysed.

Infringement litigation can be disruptive and expensive, the paper Patents, Trade Marks and Design Rights: Groundless Threats: A Consultation Paper examines the law regarding false accusations of patent, trade mark or design right infringement, the mere threat of which may cause significant commercial damage to a business. The existing law provides protection to businesses if an infringement threat is groundless. The groundless threat provisions were introduced in the nineteenth century to resolve disputes about steam engines. The Commission believes that they need to be adapted to the new global battles over information technology and is consulting on how they can be brought up to date. The Commission is consulting on two approaches to reform: (i) to build on the reforms made to patent law in 2004 and to extend these to the other rights, also proposing that legal advisers should be protected from liability for groundless threats; and

An easy-to-understand guide for designers on the legal topics that deeply affect their everyday professional activities, Become a Successful Designer provides designers with ways to protect and handle their intellectual property rights. Focus groups are all kinds of designers of the product, furniture, interior, fashion, textile, communications, graphics, and computational design areas. The authors Joachim Kobuss, Alexander Bretz and Arian Hassani explain the legal framework and the possibilities to act in that field from a completely new point of view. The law and its effects on the individual designer are described in the context of designers’ everyday practice. Here, the legal aspects of design do not appear in incomprehensible legalese but are rather shown as a strategic instrument for designers which can be fun to handle. All topics are discussed from an international and general viewpoint – due to the increasing globalization in the design fields.

Filling a new need in engineering education, Getting Design Right: A Systems Approach integrates aspects from both design and systems engineering to provide a solid understanding of the fundamental principles and best practices in these areas. Through examples, it encourages students to create an initial product design and project plan.Classroom-te

Including a copy of the act, the culmination of 15 years of consideration of reforms to the law of copyright, this book provides a legal framework for the advances in technology in recent years and aims to explain the detail of the act as well as describe the existing law which underpins it.

Protecting designs is complex and diverse; it involves deciding whether to protect them by design law, copyright law, or by both laws. A single protection may be under- or overprotective but two or more can be overprotective if there are no rules regulating the overlap. Legal systems in Europe and abroad have struggled to find the most adequate solution to this problem. This book traces the history of the design/copyright interface of fifteen countries, selected for their diversity in the way they dealt with the interface. It examines how these countries have coped with the problems engendered by the interface, the rules they applied to it over time and the reasons for legislative changes. This analysis reveals the most appropriate rules to regulate the interface at EU and global level and will appeal to academics, practising lawyers, judges, students and policymakers all over the world.