Design Protection: Don’t Sleep on Copyrights
28 09 2021LexBlog/99 Park Row
James Aquilina
September 27, 2021
In a recent decision, the Review Board of the United States Copyright Office (“Board”) reversed an examiner’s prior refusal to register a copyright in the artistic elements present in the bed shown above, paving the way for the applicant to obtain a copyright registration in this work.
Copyright law does not protect useful articles per se (i.e., articles having a useful function that does not serve merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information), but does protect any artistic feature that is applied to or incorporated in a useful article, if the feature: “(1) can be perceived as a two- or three-dimensional work of art separate from the useful article and (2) would qualify as a protectable pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work—either on its own or fixed in some other tangible medium of expression—if it were imagined separately from the useful article into which it is incorporated.” Star Athletica, LLC v. Varsity Brands, Inc., 137 S. Ct 1002, 1007 (2017).
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