Design Rights are Valuable Assets

"Design rights provide powerful protection against unauthorised copying, but are not yet widely used in Finland. For SMEs, design rights protection or trademarks are a cost-effective way of protecting their know-how in the long term," says Kolster's IP expert.

"In my work, I evaluate protection strategies as a whole and help customers to choose suitable protection systems. I also tell the customer what kind of designs are worth protecting and how to ensure the best possible scope of protection."

Why obtain a design right?
When the appearance or visual aspect of a product is a specially designed, integral element, it is worth protecting through registration. Design rights can protect the form, pattern, colour and other features of a product.

What can happen if the appearance or other features of a product are not protected?
Someone else can exploit them. In such a case, registration provides a clear and good starting point for defending your IP.

What do design rights protect?
With a design right, you can protect a design’s appearance or part of it. This provides you with temporary and country-specific or regionally exclusive rights. To deprive competitors of freedom to operate, it is also possible to register variants of your own product so that the competitor cannot even create approximations to your solution. In principle, the design must be unpublished and sufficiently distinct from the prior art.