Law Commons^™

Investigating Design, Jessica Silbey, Mark P. Mckenna

Faculty Scholarship

Design is ascendant. Steve Jobs’s legendary obsession with design was widely regarded as Apple’s comparative advantage, and that lesson has not been lost on its competitors. Design thinking is a growth industry, in business and at universities, and design professionals continue to take on increasingly significant roles within firms. The increasing economic significance of design has been reflected in an explosion of design patent applications and increasing amount of design litigation.

Despite design’s growing economic and legal importance, relatively little is known by legal scholars and policymakers about designers or the design process. This paper addresses that gap and is …

How Should Damages Be Calculated For Design Patent Infringement?, Mark D. Janis

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Claiming Design, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

Design stands out among intellectual property subject matter in terms of the extent of overlapping protection available. Different forms of intellectual property usually protect different aspects of a product. In the design context, however, precisely the same features are often subject to design patent, trademark, and copyright protection-and parties commonly claim more than one of those forms. Yet, as we show, the claiming regimes of these three forms of design protection differ in significant ways: the timing of claims; claim format (particularly whether the claims are visual or verbal); the multiplicity of claims (whether and how one can make multiple …

Greeted With A Shrug: The Impact Of The Community Design System On United States Law, Stacey Dogan

Faculty Scholarship

In an era of increased harmonization of intellectual property laws worldwide, the United States’ treatment of product design looks like an anomaly. Since the European Community Design System went into effect in 2002, advocates in the US have urged Congress to follow suit and adopt sui generis design protection, particularly for fashion. The US Congress, however, has resisted the call and left design protection to the existing standards of trademark, copyright and design patent law.

This Chapter explores some of the reasons that the Community Design System has had so little purchase in US debates over design. The rejection of …

What's In, And What's Out: How Ip's Boundary Rules Shape Innovation, Mark Mckenna, Christopher J. Sprigman

Journal Articles

Intellectual property law sorts subject matter into a variety of different regimes, each with different terms of protection and different rules of protectability, infringement, and defenses. For that sorting to be effective, IP needs principles to distinguish the subject matter of each system. This paper focuses on one of the most important aspects of border-drawing that our IP system undertakes — identifying “useful” subject matter.

This aspect is critical because our IP system gives utility patent law pride of place and draws the boundaries of the other doctrines in large part to respect utility patent’s supremacy. Yet IP law’s sense …

Disclosing Designs, Mark D. Janis, Jason Du Mont

Articles by Maurer Faculty

While patent scholars have subjected disclosure doctrines to considerable scrutiny in the context of utility patent law, very little has been written about the role of those doctrines in design patent law. At first blush, this is not surprising: modern design patent documents usually contain short disclosures comprised primarily of drawings, accompanied by very little text. Although this might suggest limited aspirations for design patent disclosures, the story is more complex. Design patents contain only a pro forma claim; it is the disclosure that defines the scope of the protected design. Moreover, although the modern practice of relying primarily on …

Progress And Competition In Design, Mark Mckenna, Katherine J. Strandburg

Journal Articles

This Article argues that applying patent-like doctrine to design makes sense only if a design patent system is premised on a patent-like conception of cumulative progress that permits patent examiners and courts to assess whether a novel design reflects a nonobvious step beyond the prior art. If there is a meaningful way to speak of such an inventive step in design, then design patent doctrine should be based on that conception. If nonobviousness has no sensible meaning in design, then a patent system cannot work for design. At present, design patent doctrine is in disarray because it is unmoored from …

Functionality In Design Protection Systems, Mark D. Janis, Jason J. Du Mont

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In comparison to functionality doctrine in trade dress cases, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the role of functionality doctrine in design protection systems such as the U.S. design patent system and the EU Community Design regime. Yet functionality considerations potentially affect many validity and scope determinations in the design protection area. In this Article, we critically evaluate judicial application of the functionality doctrine in design protection systems, focusing on the U.S. design patent and EU design protection regimes. We argue that the doctrine as applied in these settings is too often aimless and inconsistent. Some simple doctrinal refinements …