Discussion On Criteria Of The Design Patent Licensed And Infringed

Appearance design is an important part of patent; it is mainly to protect theinnovation of industrial appearance. Protection element is the shape, color, pattern,and combinations thereof, but these elements destined to have some very subjectivecharacteristics, because of the different awareness to beautiful. Therefore, a bigcontroversy existing on the design patent licensed and infringed during the judgment.so it is difficult to accurately define. Car as a consumer products, because of itsunique structure and the difference on understand, it is more difficult to define thecriteria of the design patent licensed and infringed.In2011, China’s auto market achieved steadily growth. Automobile productionand sales of dual ultra18.4million refreshed the global history again. Car, as alarge-scale industrial product, has an extremely complex structure design. Inparticular, in recent years, people have been improving the requirements of aestheticsense and artistic, thus consumers consider the car exterior design as an importantfactor when they are choosing cars. Because of the importance of the automotiveappearance, various car manufacturing companies will focus on the development ofautomotive appearance design and manufacturing technology. In the process ofdevelopment, it is inevitable to draw on the technique between the different enterprises, and then the infringement of design patent rises. In this thesis, on thebasis of three cases (“Spanish vehicle seat, Inc. v. Su Zhou Jin long case”,“WheelCase”,"Panda" v."Wizard" case), the author tries to conclude several common legalissues and theoretical focuses in the infringement cases of automotive design via theanalysis of these three cases.Specifically, the issues and focuses includes: Some problems in the existing legalprovisions; the infringement elements of car design;"Design space" theory; The mainproblem of similarity judgment; Overall product design patent and the relative amongthe parts of design. With the new patent law "and the latest version of the patentexamination guidelines", this paper describes some basic theories of car design patent,and discusses the infringement manner and scope of protection on automotive designpatent.Through the analysis of the preceding part of the paper, at the end of this article,the author puts forward some recommendations for a number of problems in thecurrent law, and hopes that the design patent law will be more perfect and lays thelegal basis for the healthy development of China’s auto industry. In all, The authorhopes that through this article, can have a further study on design patent. At the sametime, Car as standard, elaborated on the special nature of automotive design.