Copied design cancelled

Alicante News brings word of a rare success in cancelling a Community design (RCD 001595737-0001) on the basis of an earlier national European copyright. The reasons for the relative underuse of copyright as a ground of attack are probably threefold - firstly, copyright in designs is a matter of unharmonised national law which varies widely across Europe, secondly, OHIM (with its allergy to hearings and live witnesses) is ill suited as a forum for assessing copying and thirdly, where the copyright work is already published, it is available for a straightforward prior art-based attack.
But in this case, the designs (of textiles) are the kind of thing that is going to be protected by copyright in most places, and the opponent managed to file evidence of a chain of correspondence from the original Belgian designer of the copyright work to the RCD applicant. In any event, the designs do appear so close that the inference of copying is pretty well unavoidable.