Pretty pylons

Set against a bleak background and a sky
laden with volcanic ash, these Icelandic pylons
have a certain degree of charm ...

An article on the BBC website today asks: can electricity pylons ever be pretty?  It explains that electricity pylons, little changed since the 1920s, may get a makeover with a new international design competition which is being run by Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) for Department of Energy and Climate Change and the National Grid.

Whoever wins will be pleased to know that the market is a big one.  There are more than 88,000 pylons in the UK alone.  This is not apparently the first such competition, as the piece explains.

If you fancy taking a look at the rules, you can find them here. Rule 4.6 deals with the intellectual property rights:

"The copyright of the design will be in accordance with the Copyright and Patents Act 1988, that is copyright rests with the author.

The promoters and the RIBA reserve the right to exhibit or publish any design submitted to this competition and the result in any way or medium they consider fit. Illustrations of any design, either separately, or together with other designs, with or without explanatory text, may be used without cost".

No reference to Community design law, whether registered or unregistered, is made.  Presumably a pylon, and parts of a pylon, qualify as a product for legislative purposes.  Perhaps the omission of design protection was a deliberate attempt to avoid contemplating the exciting question: who is the informed user of an electricity pylon?