Professor Derclaye's work relied upon in European Commission's evaluation of the EU design legal framework

DG GROW, the European Commission’s Directorate General in charge of industrial property rights, has issued its evaluation report on the design directive and design regulation.  The Commissions says “The results presented in the evaluation report show that EU legislation on designs works well overall and that it is still broadly fit for purpose. However, the evaluation revealed a number of shortcomings that need to be addressed to make the legal framework fit to support the digital and green transition of EU industry, and to become substantially more accessible and efficient for industries, SMEs and individual designers. These shortcomings include in particular a lack of clarity and robustness of certain key elements of design protection (subject matter, scope of rights and limitations), outdated or overly complicated procedures, inappropriate fee levels and fee structure, lack of coherence of the procedural rules and an incomplete single market for spare parts.”

 A number of important conclusions in the evaluation report rely on Professor Derclaye’s works namely:

• E. Derclaye, “Doceram, Cofemel and Brompton: How does the current and future CJEU case law affect digital designs?” in B. Pasa (ed.), Design, technological and digital innovation. Interdisciplinary proposals for reshaping legal protections, ESI Press, Naples, forthcoming 2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3507802
• O. Church, E Derclaye, and G. Stupfler, “An Empirical Analysis of the Design Case Law of the EU Member States” (2019) IIC, available at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40319-019-00813-0
• E Derclaye, “EU Design Law: Transitioning Towards Coherence? 15 Years of National Case Law”, in N. Bruun, G. Dinwoodie, M. Levin & A. Ohly, Transition and Coherence in Intellectual Property law, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2020, available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3355353

The Commission’s next steps will surely be a revision of the design directive and design regulation. Future action on this can be followed here.