Hi, and welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we review a recent Federal Circuit appeals case on design patents that confirmed just how far they can extend in the US.
https://archive.org/details/legalgeekep190
In the US, patents are offered on two types of innovations: utility patents for functional inventions, and design patents for ornamental and aesthetic designs of articles of manufacture. The easiest way to understand the difference is to provide the example of a table lamp, in which how the electricity functions to illuminate the bulb would be covered by utility patents, while the design defining how the lamp looks to consumers would be covered by design patents. Design patents are more like trade dress and in most other countries, designs are registered like trademarks instead of examined for patentability.
Design patents have been used a lot in recent years, especially by software companies to cover ornamental features in things like user interface designs. Perhaps most notable is the Apple v. Samsung conflict which led to damage awards of billions of dollars based on the look of a phone user interface. As these companies begin pushing the boundaries of how broad design patents can be, we come upon the current case to discuss today
This case between Curver Luxembourg and Home Expressions is interesting because it involved design patent interpretation in a scenario not previously opined upon in the courts. Curver filed a design patent entitled Furniture Part to cover an overlapping Y-design to be used on furniture in 2011. The drawings did not show the design in use on furniture, just the design by itself. During prosecution, the Patent Office Examiner objected to the title based on being too vague. Curver amended the title and the claim of the design in response to refer to this as a pattern for a chair.
Years later, Curver went to enforce this design patent against Home Expressions, which was using a substantially similar overlapping Y-pattern in baskets. Home Expressions objected to this lawsuit, claiming the design patent was limited to chairs. But as stated previously, chairs only shows up in the words of the patent, not in the drawings, and the drawings are usually what defines the claim scope of a design patent.
The Federal Circuit confirmed the lower court decision in this case that the design patent was limited by the words to implementation on a chair, thereby not being able to cover the Home Expressions baskets. The court relied on 100 years of case precedent and Patent Office practice in forcing design applications to be limited to designs as used on an article of manufacture, not just abstract 2D designs. Because no guidance on the article of manufacture was given in the drawings, the court could turn to the words of the application and make them limiting in this case. Thus, design patents are confirmed to not extend to designs absent specific goods, imposing an important limit on how broad these patents can be.
The Bottom Line is: design patents are an important tool for manufacturers to use in covering all aspects of their products, but just like utility patents, they cannot broadly extend to underlying abstract ideas and concepts. While the unusual fact pattern presented by this case may not be repeated again soon, this does provide guidance to how design patents have limits which may define when other types of IP protection may be more appropriate for use to cover a product or invention.
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