Community Designs and Brexit Flashcards
What are the two types of community designs, and from when do their rights arise?
Registered community designs (RCDs) and unregistered community designs (UCDs).
RCD rights begin on registration.
UCD rights begin on disclosure within the EU, if this is the first disclosure.
NB RCDs and UCDs are unitary across the EU (akin to unitary patents and not European patents).
What are some differences between RCDs and UCDs?
There is no grace period (aside from abusive disclosures) which applies to UCDs.
A UCDlasts for 3 years from the date of the design first being made available to the public in the EU.
An RCD lasts for five years from the date of filing, and can be renewed up to four times, each for a further five years, bringing the maximum possible term to 25 years.
For the purposes of prior art assessment, the state of the art is judged prior to the priority date for RCDs and prior to the date of first disclosure for UCDs.
Otherwise, for the purposes of the syllabus, RCDs and UCDs are very similar. RCDs are very similar to UK registered designs (for example, in terms of the definitions of novelty and indiviedual character, exclusions, grace period, etc.), and this means that UCDs differ substantially from UK unregistered designs.
What is a re-registered design?
On IP Completion Day (IP = Implementation Period) on 31 December 2020, all existing RCDs (including international registered designs designating the EU) were cloned and added to the UKIPO designs register as re-registered designs, which are basically UK registered designs subject to all normal UK registered design rules. Re-registered designs have the same filing, registration and priority dates as the RCDs they were cloned from and therefore have the same terms as well.
What happened to pending RCDs on IP Completion Day?
Applicants could keep the filing and priority dates of their application if they filed a UK registered design application within 9 months of IP Completion Day. These would be full UK registered designs, not re-registered designs, and thus the applicants would have to pay the normal UK application fee.
The above provisions apply also to pending international registered design applications in which the EU was designated.
What is a continuing unregistered design?
On IP Completion Day, all existing UCDs were replaced by continuing unregistered designs in the UK.
What this means is that all UCDs were basically allowed to continue in the UK until the end of their nature life. No continuing unregistered designs are in force anymore.
What is a supplementary unregistered design?
Following IP Completion Day, supplementary unregistered designs (SUD) were created as en entirely new form of design right in the UK.
In short, SUDs are the same as UCDs, but for the UK. The rules are all the same (so there is a three year term starting from disclosure in the UK, if this was the first disclosure of the design, and the scope of protection is the same as UK registered designs and RCDs).
SUDs supplement UK unregistered designs as the two differ in their scope. For example, SUDs cover surface decoration as ornamentation, whereas UK unregistered designs do not.
