Lualdi's staggeringly individual door design
Trevisan & Cuonzo Avvocati report a Milan design infringement trial on RCD 153333-01 and 02. The door shown in the designs (depicted above) looks very similar to, well, any door you've ever opened but on close scrutiny you can just about see that it stands proud of the door frame. The proprietor, Lualdi S.p.A, sued Dorica Castelli S.p.A., who exhibited their own Quadro' door at a Milan trade fair. They lost in interlocutory proceedings, but succeeded in the end on the merits, over a plea that the design was invalid. It appears that their definition of the "informed user" is essentially the same as that adopted by OHIM and, to a first approximation, in the UK - "a purchaser who is particularly attentive to the goods in question but is not an architect or a designer and who does not leave the choice of purchase to another but informs himself by consulting catalogues, magazines and experts to find the product that best fits his needs".
That is in line with the majority of prior Italian cases, though in one or two apparently the "informed user" has to the contrary been seen as architect or interior designer - see Professor Mario Franzosi's excellent JIPLP article Design Protection Italian Style.
One can only applaud harmony and consistency across the EU. But is this really Italian design at its best? It is hard to tell on the basis of these grainy, monochrome grey pictures, but the design in question appears to fit right into Franzosi's pithy commentary:
"Take a look at what is registered at OHIM in Alicante. ... Most of them are not work of design because they are simply ugly."
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