חוק העיצובים, התשע"ז-2017Designs Law, 2017 · automatic translation · suggest a correction

Official summary of the law (Knesset)

The Designs Law, 2017 is intended to establish a comprehensive, balanced and up-to-date arrangement applicable to designs, replacing the existing arrangement on this matter in the Patents and Designs Ordinance of 1924, subject to special provisions regarding designs. Design law, or the law of designs as it has been called until now, is a branch of intellectual property law that regulates the legal framework for protecting the designs of industrial products, as distinct from copyright law, whose purpose is to protect works, whereas a design relates to the appearance of a product composed of one or more visual features, such as shape or contour. The Law seeks to strike a balance between two public interests: on the one hand, the desire to encourage the development of new designs by granting a "monopoly" — that is, an exclusive right, limited and time-bound, to various uses of the design — and on the other hand, the desire to allow the general public to make use of designs, and therefore not to restrict the range of possibilities for designing products, and to minimize the monopoly granted to designers to the minimum necessary to maintain the incentive to develop new designs as described. The Law is also adapted to technological developments, to international law — in particular international treaties and agreements — and to Israeli case law. Below is a detailed description of some of the innovations in this Law compared with the previous law, the Patents and Designs Ordinance: First, under the legal situation prior to the Law's entry into force, the granting of a "monopoly" for a design is conditional on registration with the Ministry of Justice, which confers a period of protection of 15 years, subject to meeting the eligibility conditions for registration. The Designs Law establishes a new arrangement on two levels: the first, extending the period of protection for a registered design from 15 to 25 years, subject to eligibility conditions for registration that are not identical to those set out in the Ordinance — novelty and individual character. The second level concerns granting protection, for the first time in Israeli law, to an unregistered design, so that a designer may enjoy protection for 3 years without the need for a registration process, which involves the investment of resources and may be ineffective for designs that are passing fashions. Granting protection to an unregistered design is intended mainly to make things easier for designers who are small businesses and do not necessarily have the knowledge and resources required for the registration process. Second, the Law includes provisions that will enable the State of Israel to join an international agreement — the Hague Agreement — as a result of which Israeli designers will be able to submit a single application for design registration, which will be forwarded to all the countries that have joined the agreement. Third, the Law includes enforcement tools that do not exist in the Ordinance — criminal offenses, authority for the court to award damages without proof of loss (punitive damages), and also the option for the owner of a registered design to apply to customs and request the detention of the release of goods that, in the owner's claim, infringe their design rights, in order to create significant deterrence against potential infringers and properly protect the rights of designers.

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