DESIGN RIGHT
DEFINITION
Design right protects the visual appearance of a product, meaning its shape, contours, lines, colours, or ornamentation, as distinct from the technical function it performs, which falls to patent law instead. In the EU and UK it exists in both registered and unregistered forms with different scope and duration; the US instead protects designs mainly through design patents.
WHAT IT MEANS IN PRACTICE
A registered EU or UK design right must be filed to gain protection, similar to a patent application, and once granted lasts up to 25 years, renewed every five years, giving strong protection against any similar design regardless of whether it was independently created.
The US does not have an unregistered design right and does not use the term 'design right' the way Europe does; instead a novel product appearance is protected, if at all, through a design patent, which also requires registration and examination, or in some cases through trade dress law if the design has become distinctive of a brand.
Design right is separate from copyright in a work's underlying artistic elements, and separate again from any trademark that might exist in the same product's branding, meaning a single product can carry three different overlapping layers of protection.
It matters most to industries where product shape itself is the commercial asset: furniture, fashion accessories, consumer electronics, and packaging, where the visual form, not any written or recorded content, is what competitors copy.
AN EXAMPLE
A Danish furniture designer registers a chair's distinctive silhouette as an EU registered design, giving her 25 years of protection against any similar looking chair regardless of whether a copier ever saw her original design. An American designer with the same chair shape would instead need to pursue a US design patent to get comparable protection.
WATCH OUT
People assume that because a product's function is unprotectable, its appearance is automatically fair game to copy, when the appearance itself may carry separate design right or design patent protection.
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