Currently, there is active development of the domestic fashion industry market. To protect designer products as objects of intellectual property, it is necessary to clearly and timely apply existing regulatory mechanisms, but in practice we often encounter violations of the rights of designer authors and the appearance of counterfeit products on the market.
One of the ways to protect a design is copyright, according to which a design product receives copyright protection automatically and the law does not require additional registration and payment of fees.
It must be remembered that the fashion industry market is special - it differs from markets in other sectors of the economy in that all manufactured designer products, against the backdrop of rapidly changing fashion, have a short lifespan. In order to maintain competitiveness among domestic designers, changes were made to civil legislation in part four of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, according to which “An industrial design for which an application has been filed with the federal executive body for intellectual property, from the date of publication of information about the application until the date of publication of information about the grant of a patent, is granted temporary legal protection in the amount determined by the totality of essential features of the industrial design, reflected in the images of the appearance of the product contained in published application for an industrial design, but not more than in the amount determined by the totality of essential features reflected in the images of the appearance of the product contained in the decision of the specified federal body to issue a patent for an industrial design."
Obtaining temporary legal protection for an industrial design allows the copyright holder to demand remuneration from an unscrupulous competitor after he receives a patent and publishes information about its issuance. The amount of compensation for its use by an unscrupulous competitor is determined by the court for the period of time from the date of publication of the application to the date of publication of information about the grant of the patent.
An important argument for refusing patent protection for designer products, given the short period of their stay on the market, is the time frame during which a patent search is carried out, carried out for the purpose of examination for patent purity and requiring large financial investments. During this time, there is a risk of similar products appearing on the market.
That is, taking into account all of the above, the question arises about the advisability of legal protection of creative design solutions. On the one hand, time and losses, on the other hand, rapidly changing fashion and its seasonal dependence require the speedy implementation of embodied creative ideas in new products, their sale and profit.
A positive indicator of innovation may be the provision of time (12 months) to designers to study the market situation, analyze it and the opportunity to objectively assess their prospects, taking into account the seasonality of products. After receiving a positive conclusion, they may decide on the advisability of acquiring patent protection for their intellectual property as an industrial design.
