• EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES

    Community Design Protection

    European Design Law is undergoing its biggest changes in a century. On 6th March 2002, the European Community Design Regulation comes into force, and over the past few months, European countries have harmonised their national design laws with the Community system, following the 1988 Design Directive.

    The Regulation will create unregistered design rights, giving protection to designers without any formalities for three years from first disclosure of their design. This will apply to any designs created after 6th March 2002, provided that they are new and distinctive over designs which have been disclosed before.

    The unregistered protection will be supplemented, in a year or two, by a central registration process for granting registered Community designs, valid in all countries of the European Union for 25 years. Registered Community Designs will be granted by the Community Trade Mark Office in Alicante. The process will be quick and cheap, because there will be no examination for novelty and no opposition procedure.

    The registration of a design will cover all articles to which that design is applied. It will also be possible to file a single application containing multiple designs, no matter how dissimilar they are to each other. These two features of the Community design system will make it ideal for protecting designs used as brands or for marketing or merchandising. New two dimensional designs (such as a logo used as a brand, or a cartoon character) or three dimensional designs (such as the shape of a toy figure, a car, or an item of furniture) can be registered in a single application, allowing them to be applied to any kind of merchandise under the protection of the application.

    A very broad range of designs can be protected, extending from works of art through graphic designs, to functional products such as machines, or to screen display elements on computers. It will even be possible to register a design up to one year after it was first disclosed, allowing the design to be tested in the marketplace before registration.

    The Community Design system represents a mixture of patent and trade mark law; the monopoly rights given, and the conditions under which designs are valid, are similar to those for patents, whereas the registration process will be similar to that for Community trade marks.

    Jenkins have created a European Design team combining expertise from both of these fields, to offer design advice, design filing services, and design litigation support. The design team is:

    David Musker. David is a Partner. He sits on the Designs and Copyright Committee at the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents, and is qualified as a UK Chartered Patent Agent, a European Patent Attorney, and a Trademark Representative before OHIM. David is the author "The Design Directive" (the only book on the new national design laws) published in 2001 by the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents. His book on the Community Design Regulation will be published later in 2002.

    Tim Pendered. Tim is a Partner. He is qualified as a UK Chartered Patent Agent and Fellow of the Institute of Trademark Agents, and as a European Patent Attorney and a Trademark Representative before OHIM. He practices in both patents and trademarks, and also has long experience in the protection of products by design.

    Together, they will combine wide experience in procedures at OHIM with unique expertise in the new design system.