Bloggers or Blaggers? Stalkers or Leakers? Have OHIM stolen Europe's Auto Secrets?

There is nothing the auto industry enjoys so much as the razzamatazz of a new car launch.  Yet as mass expulsions remind us of the spy era, there are rumours that OHIM has a mole, who leaks new car designs to auto bloggers.  "It's no great secret that the European Union's patent office has more leaks than a Soviet submarine" writes Noah Joseph of Autoblog, according to whom OHIM "has more leaks than a colendar".  Alex Ricciuti of  Worldcarfans  claims to be publishing pictures "... courtesy of a leak from the European Office for Harmonization of the Internal Market (OHIM), where trademark records are kept."
Rather than take these alarming claims at face value, in this blog-eat-blog world a few quick searches enable us to reveal the truth.
Take first Ricciuti's claim to have published leaked designs of the Opel Ampera.   His blog article is dated 18th February 2009.  However, the pictures he shows had already, quite properly, been published by OHIM several days earlier on 11th February as RCD 001086300-0001.
On to Autoblog (motto: "We Obsessively Cover the Car Industry").  On August 13th 2008, Noah Joseph claimed that the "EU Patent Office" had leaked the design of the restyled Mazda MX-5.  In fact, OHIM had published the design on 11th August as RCD 000977384-0001.  Autoblog revealed the design of the Suzuki Kizashi on 11th September 2008, acknowledging their source as OHIM's records, and not at that time claiming that there had been a leak.  OHIM had published the design in question the previous day, as RCD 000990122-0001.  On 18th January 2009, they broke news of the design of the Nissan 370Z Roadster, Joseph this time claiming that it was from an OHIM leak.  In fact, lower down the article they quote their source as The Motor Report blog, on which the relevant article (also of 18th January) cites OHIM but does not claim a leak.  And, indeed, OHIM had published the design as RCD 001030282-0002 on 14th January.
Joseph's "Soviet submarine" claim was made in the course of his disclosure of the design of the "stretch" Pullman Mercedes reported on 4th May 2009.  But, as you are by now no doubt expecting, OHIM had published the design as RCD 000999024 (several parts) on 30th April.
In the same article, Joseph referred back to the Nissan Roadster "leak", and one other, dated 11th August 2008, concerning the "facelifted" Mazda 3.  The Mazda 3 article quotes as its source an article on the Carspyshots blog.  OHIM appears to have published the design in question as RCD 000974795-0001 on 6th August. 
Putting these claims together, there is no evidence that anyone has published OHIM applications before OHIM itself has done so.  On the other hand, there is ample evidence that the blogs are closely monitoring publications in the car class (Locarno class 12.08) and publishing within a few days, or even hours. Foremost is Autoblog's  Alberto Ballestin, who has an OHIM watch page.   One could be forgiven for assuming that they were tipped off in advance, but the evidence does not require that assumption.  Unless Joseph or Ricciuti care to reveal their sources, it seems likely that they are simply passing off stalking as leaking.
To take one last example, on 13th July, the Carscoop blog published an article disclosing some Chevrolet designs.  OHIM had published these on 12th July, as RCD 001729088-0001 & 2.  The filing date was ... only five days earlier, on 7th July.  
The moral?  OHIM is now publishing e-filed applications in a matter of days.  Carmakers who want to keep their designs under wraps would do well to use OHIM's "deferred publication" system, to keep the publication date in their own hands.

This week - European CFI hears design appeal

Tomorrow Tuesday 19th January is the Hearing date for European Court of First Instance case T-153/08, Shenzhen Taiden v OHIM - Bosch Security Systems intervening. This is the second stage appeal on RCD 214903-0001, a conference call speakerphone. The design was upheld at first instance by the Invalidation Division of OHIM, but that decision was reversed on appeal, the Board of Appeal (in Decision R 1437/2006-3) taking a much broader view of the design freedom available to the designer of such products and hence finding the design too similar to the cited prior art. Since in Europe essentially the same test is applied for infringement as for validity, the CFI decision will affect both. Will they find the design valid (and consequently of narrow scope) or invalid (but potentially of broad scope)? Watch this space.

OHIM Board of Appeal rules on functional designs

According to Alicante News, OHIM's Board of Appeal has invalidated a design on the basis that it is dictated by technical function (Decision of the Third Board of Appeal of 22 October 2009 in case R 690/2007-3). This is unsurprising - but what certainly is surprising is that the Board has not followed the Opinion of the Advocate General in the Philips case, nor that of the UK Court of Appeal in Landor & Hawa v Azure (which followed the A-G in Philips) but has gone its own way. To quote:

“That provision [i.e. CDR 8(1)] denies protection to features of a product's appearance that are ‘solely dictated by its technical function'. Those words do not, on their natural meaning, imply that the feature in question must be the only means by which the product's technical function can be achieved. On the contrary, they imply that the need to achieve the product's technical function was the only relevant factor when the feature in question was selected.”

To UK ears, this sounds much like the House of Lords in Amp v Utilux. It is also, of course, consistent with the treatment of trade marks by the ECJ in Philips, as suggested by the Dutch courts.

The complete decision is not yet available on the website. In the meantime, here is a link to the first instance decision. Will this be appealed to the CFI? Will the ECJ follow OHIM, or its own A-G? We await these answers (and your thoughts, dear readers) with bated breath.

Novelty v individual character – It’s the nose, stupid!

In one of the most recent decisions of OHIM’s Board of Appeal interested readers will find juicy comments on novelty and individual character. While, says the Board, Article 6 (individual character) refers to the notion of the “informed user” to be “identified on the basis of the class of products within which, according to the application for registration, the design itself is intended to be incorporated”, Article 5 (novelty) allegedly does not specify such a referenced person. OHIM, therefore, would be asked “to assess the differences on the basis of the overall appearance of the designs in question”. Furthermore, according to OHIM, the informed user is generally “not technically experienced or particularly interested in the technical design” of colanders (this is what the invalidated Community design was registered for). Hence, says OHIM, this user won’t pay attention to “every detail of the device. Instead, he will undertake an overall view including inter alia the attractiveness of the design and the practicability of the device.”

While this guidance on delimiting novelty and individual character is helpful per se, it appears questionable how to take it into account in daily business. If OHIM is right, the novelty test would have to be carried out by each individual judicial body (OHIM or a Community design court), whereas the individual character test would require to don the spectacles of an informed user – but isn’t it in the end still the nose of the judicial body on which the spectacles would be found?

Door opens for design owners in Italy

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."

Fabrics - no Design Copyright in India

Our friends at K&S report the appeal judgment in Microfibres v. Giridhar & Co (taken together with two others: Mattel Inc & Ors v. Jayant Agarwala & Ors and Dart Industries v. Techno Plast & Ors). The plaintiff had not registered their fabric design, and now sought to enforce artistic copyright in the painting on which it was based.
The defence was that, once the artistic work had been industrially applied by 50 articles having been made, copyright could not be used to prevent competitors from doing likewise, under Section 15(2) of the Copyright Act, 1957 (a provision having counterparts in many other countries which share a common copyright ancestry with the UK) which
is in the following terms:

Copyright in any design, which is capable of being registered under the Designs Act, 1911 (2 of 1911), but which has not been so registered, shall cease as soon as any article to which the design has been applied has been reproduced more than fifty times by an industrial process by the owner of the copyright or, with his licence, by any other person.

The Court upheld the defendants. Indian public policy was to protect industrially exploited articles by design registration, or not at all. In this case, in fact, the plaintiff had indeed registered the designs in the UK (possibly as GB 0602285 or GB 0600566) - but not in India.
Along the way, the Court considered arguments that the intention in creating the copyright work was relevant, or that the artistic quality was relevant, and rejected both - quite correctly, we think.
There was, however, an interesting argument in the judgment for IP practitioners. Greybeards will remember Catnic v Hill & Smith [1978] FSR 405, [1982] RPC 183 - one of Catnic's interminable lintel battles. In that judgment, Whitford J held that on applying for a patent, one effectively elected to waive copyright in the corresponding drawings. According to Whitford:

"In my view, by applying for a patent and accepting the statutory obligation to describe and if necessary illustrate embodiments of its invention, a patentee necessarily makes an election accepting that, in return for a potential monopoly, upon publication, the material disclosed by him and the specification must be deemed to be open to be used by the public, subject only to such monopoly rights as he may acquire on his application for the patent and during the period for which his monopoly remains in force, whatever be the reason for the monopoly rights.

That decision certainly had a chequered history. Whitford J. cited himself with approval in Rose Plastics GmbH v. William Beckett & Co. (Plastics) Limited and Another [1989] 1 F.S.R. 113, but no other UK judge did so, and the decision was not followed in Ireland (House of Spring Gardens Limited and Others v. Point Blank Limited and Others [1985] F.S.R. 327), New Zealand (Wham-O Manufacturing Co. v. Lincoln Industries [1982] R.P.C. 281), Australia (Ogden Industries Pty. Ltd. v. Kis (Australia) Ltd [1983] F.S.R. 616) or Hong Kong (Interlego AG v. Tyco Industries Inc. and Others [1987] F.S.R. 409 CA). On the other hand, it was apparently followed in Canada (see Gordon J. Zimmerman), and statutory provision was made in New Zealand to enshrine it in the Copyright Act. It was pointedly distinguished in a later UK design case, Gardex v Sorata [1986] RPC 623, and it is now widely thought to be bad law here. It is therefore strange and sad to see it cited as authority for the proposition that you can't have your design cake and still eat copyright, and a shame that the Court did not take the chance to rule the argument out in India.

ECJ's FEIA decision on commissioned designs

The ECJ has decided the FEIA case C-32/08, and remarkably quickly by their own lights. The case concerned ownership of commissioned designs.
The designs in question (of cuckoo clocks) were part of a project started by FEIA (Fundación Española para la Innovación de la Artesanía, or Spanish Foundation for the Innovation of Craftsmanship) and organised by AC&G SA, who then made an oral contract with Cul de Sac Espacio Creativo SL, the employers of the designs in question. FEIA claimed ownership in the Spanish courts. Spanish law, like that of the UK, vests rights in the commissioner rather than the designer. They won at first instance but on appeal the Court referred the issue to the ECJ.
We reported the AG's Opinion here, back in April. As usual, the Court agrees with the broad thrust of the Opinion.

The headline issue couldn't be clearer:
"the arguments of the FEIA and the United Kingdom Government that the terms ‘employer’ and ‘employee’, in particular, in Article 14(3) must be interpreted broadly in order to apply also to commissioned designs, must be rejected."

These are questions of Community, not national, law:
"Thus, it follows from the need for uniform application of Community law and from the principle of equality that the terms of a provision of Community law which makes no express reference to the law of the Member States for the purpose of determining its meaning and scope must normally be given an autonomous and uniform interpretation throughout the Community, having regard to the context of the provision and the objective pursued by the legislation in question (see, inter alia, Case 327/82 Ekro [1984] ECR 107, paragraph 11; Case C‑287/98 Linster [2000] ECR I-6917, paragraph 43; and Case C‑316/05 Nokia [2006] ECR I-12083, paragraph 21). That is the case for the terms ‘designer’ and ‘successor in title’ in Article 14 of the regulation."

In paras 79 to 82 they deal with the effects of assignments:
"79 It follows from the above that the possibility of assigning by way of contract the right to the Community design from the designer to his successor in title within the meaning of Article 14(1) of the regulation is consistent with both the wording of that article and the aims of the regulation.
80 It is, however, for the national court to ascertain the contents of such a contract and in that regard to determine whether the right to the unregistered Community design has in fact been transferred from the designer to his successor in title.
81 The above considerations clearly do not preclude the national court, in the context of that assessment, from applying the law on contracts in order to determine who owns the right to the unregistered Community design, in accordance with Article 14(1) of the regulation.
82 In the light of all the above considerations, in circumstances such as those of the main proceedings, the answer to part (a) of the third question is that Article 14(1) of the regulation must be interpreted as meaning that the right to the Community design vests in the designer, unless it has been assigned by way of contract to his successor in title."

All clear enough. It does highlight the need to ensure that outsourced designs are clearly covered by contract - the default rule of UK or Spanish law should not be relied on for Community rights.

Commissioned Designs and Employee Designs

To jump-start this blog, here is a link to the long-awaited first ECJ words of wisdom on Community Designs, in Case C-32/08 FEIA . Strangely, the issue isn't one of the fundamentals of design protection, but what, to the unobservant, might appear to be a bit of a no-brainer.
Anyway, here are the questions referred by the Alicante court:

1. Must Article 14(3) of [Council Regulation (EC) No 6/2002 of 12 December 2001 on Community designs be interpreted as referring only to Community designs developed in the context of an employment relationship where the designer is bound by a contract governed by employment law whose provisions are such that the designer works under the direction and in the employ of another? or
2. Must the terms ‘employee’ and ‘employer’ in Article 14(3) of Regulation No 6/2002 be interpreted broadly so as to include situations other than employment relationships, such as a relationship where, in accordance with a civil/commercial contract (and therefore one which does not provide that an individual habitually works under the direction and in the employ of another), an individual (designer) undertakes to execute a design for another individual for a settled price and, as a result, it is understood that the design belongs to the person who commissioned it, unless the contract stipulates otherwise?
3. In the event that the answer to the second question is in the negative, on the ground that the production of designs within an employment relationship and the production of designs within a non-employment relationship constitute different factual situations, (a) is it necessary to apply the general rule in Article 14(1) of Regulation No 6/2002 and, consequently, must the designs be construed as belonging to the designer, unless the parties stipulate otherwise in the contract? or (b) must the Community design court rely on national law governing designs in accordance with Article 88(2) of Regulation No 6/2002?
4. In the event that national law is to be relied on, is it possible to apply national law where it places on an equal footing (as Spanish law does) designs produced in the context of an employment relationship (the designs belong to the employer, unless it has been agreed otherwise) and designs produced as a result of a commission (the designs belong to the party who commissioned them, unless it has been agreed otherwise)?
5. In the event that the answer to the fourth question is in the affirmative, would such a solution (the designs belong to the party who commissioned them, unless it has been agreed otherwise) conflict with the negative answer to the second question?

The Regulation is pretty clear that it is referring to employees, and the question of commissioned works was raised, but not settled, during the interminable legislative negotiations. That results in Community Designs being treated differently to UK registered and unregistered designs (and, it seems, Spanish designs too), where ownership vests in the commissioner, but in line with other EU legislation (eg the software directive and the chip topography directive). It is a bit of a trap for the unwary, I suppose, as the UK government intervened to say.

We now have the AGO's Opinion of 26th March 2009 - not, alas, in English so far, but here is a link to the French version.

The answer would appear to be that "employed" does indeed mean "employed". Hurrah. Will the ECJ, as usual, agree? Stay tuned. And if you're looking on the ECJ search page, don't bother selecting "Intellectual Property" - for some reason, this one comes up under "Free Movement of Goods".