ELZABURU has had the pleasure of working together with the publisher Thomson-Reuters Aranzadi on Fashion Law, a pioneering work in Spain on the subject of fashion law, which was presented on 16 April.

In these short weekly summaries, the professionals at ELZABURU who participated in the work offer us a brief outline of their contributions:

If there is a word that is inextricably linked with the world of fashion, it is “design”.

The second chapter looks at industrial designs from the legal standpoint, as an appropriate form of industrial property for protection of creations in the fashion sector and as a sort of formal innovation in reference to the features of a product’s appearance per se or its ornamentation.

A brief introduction sets out the legal concept of a “design”, the requirements for protection and the content of the right in the registered design.

It goes on to provide a practical and concise outline of the possible strategies for design protection that a company in the fashion sector can adopt, with reference to the different instruments of protection available under the current legal framework, particularly the concepts of registered and unregistered designs, grace period and deferment of publication, and to how a company in the fashion sector can make use of these concepts in each situation.

Given the increasingly globalised world in which we live, there is naturally a section that deals with the territorial extension of protection of designs and possible strategies for internationalization, focusing in particular on the supranational systems for protection, such as the Community design at the EUIPO and the international design at WIPO, setting out their advantages.

The chapter also touches on the relationship between industrial designs and copyright in the field of fashion. In theory, these two types of protection are accumulative in some cases if the design in question is held to possess the sufficient degree of originality and creativity to be protected as an artistic work. However, many creations in the world of fashion are for goods destined for mass consumption and industrial production, which are unlikely to be classed as artistic works.

The chapter concludes with a section setting out real cases, some of which are certainly unusual, relating to industrial designs in the fashion sector, which the author of the chapter has come across in his years of practice in the field of industrial designs and wanted to share with readers.

Authors: Pedro Saturio 

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Blog entries in the series Fashion Law:

1.Trademark protection in the fashion sector (23.04.2018)

2.Design protection in the fashion sector (30.04.2018)

3.Patent protection in the fashion sector (07.05.2018)

4.Protection of fashion through copyright (21.05.2018)

5. Image rights in the fashion sector (28.05.2018)

6.Fashion Law. Data Fashion (04.06.2018)

7.Counterfeiting in the fashion sector (11.06.2018)

8.Exhaustion of rights in the fashion sector (18.06.2018)

9.Corporate reputation in the fashion sector (25.06.2018)

10. Protection of the commercial imagen of a fashion brand (04.07.2018)

11. Websites, Apps & Social Networks (13.07.2018)

12. Valuation of intangible assets (17.07.2018)

13. Licensing (06.09.2018)