The Latest Design Consultation - Yet Another Overhaul of Design Law
Design Museum, London Author Anthony O'Neill Licence CC BY-SA 2.0 Source Wikimedia Commons Jane Lambert Every so often, the government of the day has a bash at changing design law. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 abolished copyright as a means of protecting product designs, introduced a new intellectual property right known as unregistered design right and modified the Registered Designs Act 1949. That statute was further modified by the Registered Design Regulations, which implemented Directive 98/71/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 October 1998 on the legal protection of designs. Council Regulation (EC) No 6/2002 of 12 December 2001 on Community designs introduced two more IP rights known respectively as registered and unregistered Community designs. The Intellectual Property Act 2014 brought further modifications to both registered designs and unregistered design rights. Brexit abolished regist...