EU Registered Designs

An EU Design covers all of Western Europe with the exception of the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Norway and minor principalities such as Monaco and Andorra. Thus, an EU Design extends to Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden.

Although national design applications are also available, the cost of an EU Design application is very advantageous compared to the costs of filing and prosecuting a number of national applications. It is generally cheaper to register an EU Design than to register two or more national designs. It is possible to include multiple designs in one application and there is an additional official fee for each extra design.

For further information on costs, please contact one of our designs experts.

A “design” is defined in the European Design Regulation as meaning the “appearance of the whole or a part of a product resulting from the features, in particular the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture and/or materials, of the product itself and/or of its decoration, including the movement, transition or any other sort of animation of those features”.  A “product” means; The Regulation goes on to define a “product” as “any industrial or handicraft item other than a computer program, regardless of whether it is embodied in a physical object or materialises in a non-physical form, including: a) packaging, sets of articles, spatial arrangements of items intended to form an interior or exterior environment, and parts intended to be assembled into a complex product; b) graphic works or symbols, logos, surface patterns, typographic typefaces, and graphical user interfaces”. These definitions make EU Design protection available for a wider range of designs than were previously protectable by registration under some national systems. As well as protecting the designs of three-dimensional products and of patterns for which registered design protection has traditionally been obtained, it is possible to protect items such as logos, computer icons, GUIs, animated computer interfaces and fictional (e.g. cartoon) characters. In many cases therefore both design and trade mark registrations will be available for the same thing. It is possible to protect the appearance of part of a product, such as the handle of a mug or the lid of a pen.

We file application documents online. The applications are then processed at the European Union Intellectual Property Office, which also deals with EU Trade Mark applications. We can file applications in English or German, which are official languages of the EUIPO. A second language must be designated, but no translations have to be provided.

EU Design applications are able to claim priority from earlier national filings which were filed in the previous six months.

There is no official search or novelty examination, but there is examination for basic formal requirements. Registration, and hence publication, of the design typically occurs within a few days of filing if all formalities are properly completed. If however the applicant wishes to keep the design secret for a while, it is possible to request deferred publication, up to a maximum of 30 months from the date of filing, or, if a priority is claimed, from the priority date. This may be useful to make sure that a design is not published until after a product has been launched.

The initial period of protection is five years from the filing date, renewable for five year periods up to a total possible term of 25 years.

It is possible to apply to the EUIPO for a declaration of invalidity based on a number of grounds, including the grounds that the design lacks novelty or individual character over designs which have been made available to the public. It is therefore necessary when filing design applications to consider these requirements.

Designs are deemed to lack novelty if their features differ only in immaterial details from a known design. A design is considered to have individual character if the overall impression it produces on the informed user differs from the overall impression made by a known design. The extra individual character test may require greater differences than the novelty test.

In considering what designs have been made available to the public in order to apply the novelty and individual character tests, there is an exclusion for disclosures which could not reasonably have become known in the normal course of business to the circles specialised in the sector concerned, operating within the EU. The intention of the wording is to prevent prior art from very obscure sources, which the designer could not reasonably have known about, from being cited.

There is also a one year grace period in respect of disclosures by the designer. This is calculated back from the date of filing an application for a registered EU Design, or if priority is claimed, from the date of priority. However, in cases where design protection may be required in other countries which do not have this grace period, the safest course is to keep any design secret until an application to register it has been filed.