Thursday, January 27, 2011

99 mentions of 'design', but it's really a copyright case

Case C‑168/09 Flos SpA v Semeraro Casa e Famiglia SpA, a reference to the European Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling from the Tribunale di Milano (Italy), is really a copyright case but the 'd' word appears in it exactly 99 times.

As the headnote states, the case concerns a "National law [that of Italy] precluding copyright protection or rendering it unenforceable for a certain period in the case of designs which entered the public domain before the entry into force of the law".  The court considers the effect of Article 17 of Design Directive 98/71 on Italy's copyright law, Article 17 being the provision that permits cumulative protection by design and copyright law and, by inference, which also permits protection by copyright even where the work in question was formerly protected by an expired design right.  There's also some interesting analysis of the principle of the protection of legitimate expectations, a doctrine of which I suspect we have yet to hear the last.

Background and illustration here.

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