Registered design rights
Designs Law

Rights in designs allow businesses to prevent others from copying a design or drawings of the design and significant parts of the design. Loosely speaking, design rights are the copyright of the manufacturing industries.

Registered design rights have a broader application to manufactured articles than the unregistered design right. Graphic symbols and typefaces are registrable. Therefore legal protection for some designs will only be available provided the design is registered. More stringent tests for registered design apply than to the unregistered design right. The aspects of appearance of the whole or part of a product, resulting from features lines, contours, colours, shape, texture or materials of the product or its ornamentation is registrable provided it is:

1. is novel,
2. has an individual character and
3. is not excluded from registration.

What may be Registered?

A product is anything industrial or a handmade item other than a computer program. Typefaces such as fonts, packaging, trade dress, and graphic symbols such as icons, signs, logos, drawings of fictional characters may be registered.

Artistic copyright and unregistered design rights often overlap with registered design rights, however it depends upon the particular design in question.