If you decide to bring your product to foreign markets, you need to have the protection of design and/or technological developments in those countries where you expect to conduct foreign economic activity.
Particularly, if you plan to promote your product on the European market, you will need to protect your rights in product design or packaging design in the European Union.
For these purposes, the European organization "Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market in Alicante (OHIM)" has developed the procedure for registration of an industrial design in the shortest possible terms.
What are the advantages of this procedure?
- The registration period is 5-10 business days.
- The registration is valid in 28 countries of the European Union: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Great Britain, Hungary, Germany, Greece, Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Finland, France, the Czech Republic, Sweden and Estonia.
- A single application may contain any number of industrial designs, provided that all these industrial designs belong to the same international class.
- Affordable fees (from 350 Euros).
What are possible problems after the registration?
Such short terms of registration of an industrial design are achieved due to the fact that the registration procedure does not provide for checking the design for novelty and originality. Therefore, after launching your product on the European market, there is a risk of claims for infringement of design rights from third parties.
But until such a claim is not received, and the court has not issued a decision on invalidating the registration, you may safely use the industrial design on the territory of the European Union.
