Leveraging technology to secure design rights in furniture
You don't need to be a legal expert to make sure you can benefit from your work, but a basic understanding of your options and the use of digital tools can come a long way.
The first documentation of furniture was in the Neolithic period among the Orkney people of Scotland. They essentially made use of stones to create cupboards and dressers for storage purposes. Since then, furniture designing and furniture making have come a long way. Nowadays, contemporary designs favoring aluminum, wood, and iron materials are used in creating innovative furniture that makes the implementation of our daily activities easy and enjoyable to the senses.
What are the rights attached to furniture?
Being the product of our individual and collective creativity, innovation and ingenuity, furniture is the subject matter of various overlapping intellectual property rights (IPRs) like:
- Copyrights — 2D drawings/designs of the product by hand or using a computer or machine, 3D physical adaptation of the 2D designs (derivative work)
- Industrial designs — non-functional, aesthetic parts of the furniture
- Patents: utility or design patents — functional and ornamental aspects of furniture
- Trade secrets — special know-how of making the furniture, merchandisers’ & suppliers’ list, etc.
- Trade dress — overall impression of the furniture; and
- Trademarks — name, sign, logo, etc that is used to distinguish the furniture from others.
And with the recent wave and discussion in the IP world, some furniture may even be the subject of geographical indication protection in years to come.
How can design rights be secured for the protection of furniture?
Depending on the jurisdiction and the IPRs in review, special and different criteria apply. But in securing the rights to furniture designs with technological aid and under common law principles, in the applicable jurisdiction, the process is relatively straightforward. This is subject to the furniture designer or maker being guided by some foundational rules in the creative and/or inventive process to enjoy the maximum protection across rights.
First, ensure your design is original. The final product should be significantly different from other works in the public domain. What this simply means is that the furniture needs to be unique!
Second, the furniture should incorporate new, sculptural and ornamental elements into the design. This would ensure that the finished product is of a caliber that can take advantage of common law protection.
Third, the furniture should be capable of being conceptually separated from its basic use as an object. In other words, the designing and making of the furniture should convey distinctive and disconnected artistic meanings, distinguishable from the furniture’s functional purpose.
Keep in mind:
In the EU, all designs automatically enjoy protection from all commercial exploitation by third parties from the date of first disclosure for one year.
Within that year, the market response can be gauged and a decision can be made as regards whether to register the design or not. There is also an extra layer of common law protection in the UK. The unregistered designs are protected for ten years from the date of first marketing, or for fifteen years from the date it was first recorded in a design document, whichever is first.
Irrespective of the decision taken with regards to registration, evidence of the furniture design steps is very important; either for defensive purposes or as an offensive tool to assert authorship and ownership of the furniture designs. It is also essential for ensuring ownership of registered designs during invalidation proceedings in the EU.
This is where technological aid becomes fundamental. As a furniture designer/maker, there must be concrete evidence that buttresses the right to exclusive commercial exploitation of the designs at hand. It is not enough to have signed and dated sketches, drawings, photographs, and/or videos of the design and furniture making stage, the evidence must be trusted by the public and the court. The probative value of the evidence must be very high to secure the asserted claims.
In this context, a public blockchain can be a great source of convincing evidence. Since everything happening on the blockchain is recorded immutably and publicly at a specific time and date, it can be leveraged to create an indisputable proof of the current status of the design at any stage of the creative process.
Being a gateway to this universal public registry, Bernstein enables you to certify your designs, combining the global reach of the Bitcoin blockchain with the reliability and recognition of national timestamping authorities (EU & China) to prove the existence, integrity, and ownership of your design independently and forever. This will enable you to assert and defend your existing rights internationally.
Written by Omolade Adeyemi:
Omolade is a qualified legal practitioner in Nigeria, with a specialization in IP & competition law.
