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European Council approves revised designs protection package
The Council of the European Union has recently adopted two legislative acts under the design package: a revised directive on legal protection of designs; and amended regulation on community designs. These will no longer be called community designs in the future, but European Union designs (EU designs).
The key aim is to make the process of registering designs at EU-level more time and cost-efficient, and to improve the protection available to designs in a rapidly-evolving landscape. The Council noted in 2020 that 16% of GDP and 14% of jobs in the Union related to design-intensive jobs. The impact of 3D printing and digital designs in recent years makes the need for an update to design protection for industrial designs particularly pertinent. Accordingly, these new measures – an amendment to Council regulation (EC) No 6/2002 on European Union designs and a directive on the legal protection of designs (recast of directive 98/71/EC) – were drafted to meet the requirement of modernising the Council’s approach on design protection which is, at this point, more than 20 years old.
The implementation of the new Art. 19 into the regulation addresses inter alia 3D printing by now enabling holders of EU designs to prohibit third parties from “creating, downloading, copying and sharing or distributing to others any medium or software recording the design for the purpose of enabling a product […] to be made.”.
In addition, the change in approach will have a notable impact on the spare parts market, with the introduction of the “repair clause” in new Art. 20a for “must-match” spare parts whose appearance depends on the appearance of the complex product concerned. This will see exemptions to design protection put in place for spare parts used in the upkeep of complex machinery. This will be particularly evident in the car repair sector.
Furthermore, the newly created Art. 26a provides the option of indicating a registered EU design by affixing the letter ‘D’ within a circle as a registration symbol to or near the design.
The new regulation on EU designs as well as the directive will be published in the Official Journal of the EU and will enter into force on the 20th day following publication. The regulation will then apply four months later, while there is a 36-month period regarding the directive for the member states to take necessary measures to transpose the directive.
With new technologies such as 3D printing and digitisation developing so quickly, a long-awaited update to design protection has now been implemented. This revised directive and regulations is accordingly a welcome change to existing package after more than 20 years. Overall, this revision will further harmonise national design rights of single EU member states and the EU design and we await with interest the impact it will have once it is in force.
If you require further information on how the new protection package could affect your business or products, please contact your regular Boult designs representative.