Design Patent Protection

As the result of people's wisdom, industrial design is a very important area in the field of industrial property. With the development of market economy and improvement of people's living level, industrial design becomes more and more important. Firstly, the improvement of people's living level results in the change of customers' mind. Customers need not only satisfaction of material area but also satisfaction of spiritual area. Industrial design is the very thing to satisfy people's demand in soulful area. In fact, some products' appearance becomes direct motion for customers to buy them. Secondly, with the rapid development of technology, many techniques trend to maturity, so it's difficult to make some improvements in the area of function. Industrial design becomes a very important way to increase products' extra-value. Thirdly, as the new design which is applied to articles and has aesthetical features, it has significant effect on the development of an enterprise and the overall economy of a country. The strategy about industrial design becomes an important part of intellectual property strategy of an enterprise. So many countries offer protection for industrial design, though they take different forms. TRIPS definitely demands it's member states must protect industrial design. In general, there are two forms of legal protection for design in the world. The first is the form of patent protection. The second is the form of copyright protection. And most of the countries take form of patent protection. It is the discretion of different country to take which form to protect industrial design, so it is not the emphasis of this article to discuss the forms of legal protection for industrial design. Since 1980, with the development of economy, people attach more and more importance to industrial design. In our country, the application quantity of industrial designs industrial designs increases rapidly. But they still concentrate on industrial designs with poor quality, such as packing-bag and packing-box. One of important reason is that our laws about industrial designs are not perfect, which prevents the development of industrial design in a way.This thesis consists of three sections in addition to an introduction with about 40000 words. The author first describes the important role that design plays inpromoting modem industrial advances and the purpose of the thesis. In the first section, by citing provisions in foreign legislation and theories from legal texts, the author defines "design" and analyzes its key features and compares it with relative concept, such as trademark, utility model, works of applied art and trade dress. The second part is concerned with the requirements of industrial design, which are having features of industrial designs, novelty, creativity and not to conflict with other people's prior legitimate rights. And the author gives a detailed analysis about the four requirements respectively. In the last section, the author discusses the rights of industrial design and determination of infringement On the basis of the analysis of some basic problem of industrial designs, the author makes some suggestions for legislation and legal practices to promote china's design protection to a higher level.