According to law, design means the ornamental or aesthetic aspect of a goods. It may consists of three dimensional feature like shape of goods or two dimensional features such as lines, colors or patterns.

Registered design is a grant of exclusive rights to your design within the certain territory. Design is always granted by some authority – state. In other words, registered design allows you to exclude others from using your design without your prior consent.

Design of nearly every article in which designing creativity applies can potentialy be registered. For instance new bicycle shape or ornamentation, machine pattern, shape of new hand tool, toy shape, necklace ornamentation, car part shape, boat contures, shape and ornamentation of handbag packaging, clothing pattern, fishing equipment shape, or even screen displays and icons for software.

Yes, in most countries, in order to be protected by local laws, design must be registered by the state authority. However some countries have established limited protection for unregistered designs if the certain conditions are met.

The design protection does not automaticaly arises once you create your design as it is in copyright protection system. But in some cases copyright protection may also apply as the various design creations meet the criteria of copyrightable work.

As the territorial principle applies here, the protection is only granted within the country in which you have registered your design. Exception from this are for instance the regional design systems where your design registration is valid throughout the territory of all member states of that regional union. And yes, that suddenly means you are not protected by your Armenia registered design in the Estonia.

Novelty and originality are the main conditions which design must meet in order to be eligible for registration.

Novelty means that the same design has not been previously been disclosed to the public. Originality means that the design differs from the already known designs or design combinations.

You can register your design on national, regional and international level. For more information, feel free to contact us anytime.

Once your design is registered you have exclusive right to authorize everyone else for its usage, selling, making, distribution and a few other related rights.

The registered design protection mostly lasts for maximum amount of 25 years from the date on which your design application was filed. However in most countries you must renew the duration of your registered design every 5 years in order to remain its effect. This may wary from country to country.

There are various ways of monetizing your registered design. Two main options are that you either use your registered design to get competitive edge in your market area and second is that you sell your registered design to someone who can use it as his competitive edge. Another very popular option is to licence your registered design to someone else and gain passive income regularly.

Whether you are jewelry, clothes, toys, boardgame designer (or any other type of designer) your work based on your intellectual property – your ideas converted into something tangible, something with added value. Therefore you need to protect this value as the people will buy your products thanks to this added value. The minimum you can do to protect your intangible assets is to trademark your business name or logo which is recognizable by your clients and register the most essential designs you own as trademark or as industrial design. However, the comprehensive answer would depend on many factors such as type of designs you do and your market scope.

Yes, you can. In fact, many companies do this as there are many companies out there who are selling visualy distinctive digital products. Multiverse is one example of a very good use of digital product and its potential in digital world.

No, you do not need to register your design in any official register in order to be recognized as its creator. However, if you publish the design before you register it you can have problem with obtaining registration in some countries. Therefore, always consider registration of your design before you publish it by any means.

Yes, someone else may use your product design in country B even though it is registered in country A. Because of this, there is an option to register your design in multiple countries with single application for design registration through international design protection. However, there are some legal exceptions to this in some countries.

This is a very difficult question to answer here, however we definitely recommend obtaining advice from IP specialist in this matter. You will surely have to make some due dilligence before the sale and also remember to use non-disclosure agreement whenever you discuss the confidential information related to your business (trade secrets, business methods, designing procedures, technology, material used…). Otherwise you can quickly find out that the „potential buyer“ is using your design and you can no longer effectively stop him from doing it.

Sometimes it can be very difficult to recognize whether this can be considered as intellectual property infringement. Also it is very hard to generalize what are your chances to defend your rights. It is different in every single case and it will highly depend on your current IP strategy and registrations of your IP. If you think your rights are being infringed, always consult it with IP law specialist. That can save you a lot of money and time in future.