A design is an industrial patent or property right granting its owner the sole right to use an aesthetic form (design, color, shape). National European as well as the European Design Law equally protects all industrial and/or handcrafted and technical items, including packaging, furnishings, decor, graphic symbols and typographic characters or fonts. Designs in the legal sense comprise all product manifestations or outward forms, in whole or in part, that especially result from the characteristics of line, contour, color, shape, surface structure, and/or the materials of the product itself and/or its ornamentation.
Aesthetic creations are excluded from legal patent and design protection but, in accordance with Design Law, can nevertheless be protected against imitation and reproduction when entered in the Designs Register. A design can be protected when it is new and presents individual characteristics. Likewise subject to protection is the registered two or three dimensional manifestation of a product, in whole or in part.
We advise our clients comprehensively in the protection of aesthetic design forms within the confines of national and international Design Law. Apart from registration of German, European and international design patents, we offer judicial and extrajudicial assertion of design rights and defense against third party violations. We likewise examine, advise and negotiate the entire spectrum of contracts on the exploitation of registered design patents on behalf of our clients.
