Barker Brettell LLP, the patent and trade mark agents, have an item in their blog about registered designs - long the Cinderella of intellectual property - which ought to be widely read. I don't know whether providing a link to it from here will achieve that, but we can try ... The background information is particulalry interesting, I thought.
The appearance of things (articles, products, whatever the legislation sees fit to call them) is a very important aspect of their attractiveness to consumers, and registered designs are cheap and effective protection for them. Provided, of course, that the designs are novel and have individual character, which isn't all that easy when you consider how much design work has already been carried out. Worse, a registered design is the easiest sort of intellectual property to lose because it turns out to be invalid: cluttering of the trade marks registries in and of the European Union is of little significance when compared with the designs registers (although there are so few registered designs by comparison that it doesn't matter too much). But cheap ...
The appearance of things (articles, products, whatever the legislation sees fit to call them) is a very important aspect of their attractiveness to consumers, and registered designs are cheap and effective protection for them. Provided, of course, that the designs are novel and have individual character, which isn't all that easy when you consider how much design work has already been carried out. Worse, a registered design is the easiest sort of intellectual property to lose because it turns out to be invalid: cluttering of the trade marks registries in and of the European Union is of little significance when compared with the designs registers (although there are so few registered designs by comparison that it doesn't matter too much). But cheap ...
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