Office Freylinger

Office Freylinger provides a full range of services, including state of the art searches, prosecution of design applications, renewal fees payments, licensing, validity opinions, litigation assistance.

Why protect the design of a product? The appearance of a product is often its best sales argument and this specific eye-appeal has to be protected. All products that are new and produce a different impression may be protected.

A Registered Design will also give you the opportunity to obtain injunction to stop infringement, a seizure of infringing products and other remedies such as damages or compensation.

Two types of Design Rights exist in the European Union: an Unregistered Design Right and a Registered Design Right. The Unregistered Design protects a creation as from its first publication or first divulgation in the market, for three years only and confers a protection against deliberate copy only. It will therefore be necessary to prove the rights on the design and to prove that the infringing party did have knowledge of the original design.

The interest of the Registered Design is to provide a protection up to 25 years against deliberate copy but also against confusingly similar designs through a single and simple registration procedure. Registering the design will provide a stronger and more efficient way to acquire a monopoly right on the design and to prevent any third party from manufacturing and/or commercialising copies of the registered design or confusingly similar products.

It is possible to cover a series of designs in a single “multiple” application. These designs need not be related, but must belong to the same family of products. This particularity is very useful for protecting product lines, three dimensional figures, toys, cartoons characters…

The designs that can be protected are all designs which are outwardly visible to the end user. This covers the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture and/or materials of a product or its ornamentation. For example, a new form of packaging or the new texture applied to a product can be protected. The designs protect only the appearance and cannot be used to protect, for example, hidden parts of vehicle, such as couplings, or designs which are solely dictated by the product’s technical function.

If the design has already been disclosed, it will nevertheless be possible to obtain a Registered Design provided the application for registration is filed at the latest within 12 months after this first disclosure. However attractive it may seem to defer filing until the commercial success of the design is proven, it is highly recommendable to register the design as soon as possible. This will avoid any uncertainty on the rights resulting from third parties’ creations during this 12 months “grace period”.

A period of secret of up to 30 months may also been obtained by requesting a deferred publication. This will protect the designs without disclosing commercial plans to competitors.

Steps to obtain a registration are quite simple: just provide us with photographs or representations of your design, product or ornamentation, together with the name and address of the owner.