You’re excited. You finally have a design for the product you’ve been thinking about for years. It’s your dream realised (on paper) and you start planning ahead to your future business success.
But hold on.
Before you get ahead of yourself, how can you be sure that your design and your dream is protected?
The best way to protect your design is to register it with IP Australia
IP Australia is a government body that administers IP rights and legislation relating to patents, trademarks, and designs.
They allow for designs to be registered and then certified, which will make your design right legally enforceable.
The first step is registration; this protects your design for five years from the date the application was filed and it can be renewed for a further five years following this.
Registration gives you:
● protection for the visual appearance of your product
● exclusive rights to commercially use, license or sell the design
After registration, the design will be examined and if it’s deemed new and distinctive, it will be certified.
The benefits of certifying your design right are that if someone uses your design without permission you can take action to stop them. This can only be done if your design is certified.
What is classed as a design?
Certifying your design is a great idea, but it’s important to understand IP Australia’s classification of a design. You may think that ‘design’ covers everything, but there are actually guidelines for what constitutes a design.
An industrial design may consist of three dimensional features, such as the shape of an article, or two dimensional features such as patterns, lines or colour.
You can read more about design basics here.
How will Dienamics protect my design?
Rest assured, when you use Dienamics industrial design services, your idea and design will be protected. It’s a small industry and word travels quickly of bad actors; not only that but we have a Non-Disclosure Agreement which will legally bind us to protecting your idea.
We can also help you in the process of protecting your design IP. We can register your design with IP Australia and we can create Patent Drawings for you to use for these purposes. Anything more than that and you’ll need a Patent Attorney, but we can recommend one to you.
We also have some handy resources about protecting your IP and some options for Brisbane IP lawyers.
Still not sure? Or have a question for us about product and part design? Get in touch with us today!
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