Brussels, 07/01/2002 (Agence Europe) - At the end of last year, the EU Council of Ministers adopted the regulation establishing a Community system for the protection of designs. The text sets in place a simple and inexpensive procedure for registering designs with the European Union's Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market in Alicante (Spain). Unregistered designs will also be protected. Companies will still be able to choose to register designs under national law, as national design protection harmonised by the 1998 design protection Directive will continue to exist in parallel with Community design protection.
The regulation provides for two types of design protection, directly applicable in each Member State, namely the "Registered Community Design" and the "Unregistered Community Design". In order to benefit from protection, the designs must, in both cases, be new designs with individual characteristics (it must be obvious to the public that they are different from existing products). In the context of the Community registered design system, the holders of designs likely to benefit from protection can make use of a simple, one-off and inexpensive procedure to register them with the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal market. They will then be granted exclusive rights to use the design concerned and to prevent any third party from using it anywhere within the European Union for up to 25 years.
The designs that fulfil the conditions set out in the regulation may also benefit from protection without prior registration with the Office (Unregistered Community Designs). This protection will be applicable from the date of disclosure of designs to the public within the European Union. That disclosure may occur through designs going on sale or through prior marketing or publicity. The relevant designs will be protected for three years. The only significant difference in the level of protection afforded will be that a Registered Community Design will be protected against both deliberate copying and the independent development of a similar design, while an unregistered design will be protected only against deliberate copying.
The registration of Community designs at the Office will be possible as of 2003. The Commission, in cooperation with the Office, has developed a series of legal and administrative instruments needed for this, to be examined with the Member States from next January. Next year, it will also adopt a regulation fixing the fees payable to the Office for the registration of Community designs. The rules concerning unregistered Community designs do not require any further implementation. This form of protection will therefore come into existence two months after publication of the regulation in the Office Journal, expected early next year.
For the past ten years, the Commission has viewed as a high priority the adoption of EU legislation to reduce legal obstacles to the circulation of design goods within the Internal market and to ensure fair competition in this respect. The first step was achieved in 1998, with the adoption of a Directive harmonising the main rules governing the designs registered in the Member States. In the absence of the regulation that has just been adopted, designs have had to be registered separately in each Member State where protection was sought. There means there was a potential obstacle to the free movement of those products that incorporate designs which are the subject of national rights held in different countries by different entities. Component parts of complex products upon whose appearance the protected design is dependent (such as visible car spare parts) will not be protected under the Community Design system as their protection is not foreseen by the 1998 Directive. Other component parts will nevertheless find protection under the terms of the Regulation. The Commission intends to make parallel proposals to amend the spare parts provisions of both the Directive and the Regulation in 2004.