Industrial designs

Protecting how it looks, not what it does

An industrial design registration protects the appearance of a product: its shape, its lines, its ornamentation, its texture. It protects the look independently of the function, which is exactly why it is useful. Two products can work identically and still be distinguished by a protected design.

For furniture, packaging, consumer goods, footwear, bottles, housings and jewellery this is often the strongest and cheapest protection available, and it is the one most frequently skipped.

Term

Five years from the filing date, renewable for successive periods of the same length up to a maximum of twenty-five years, subject to the corresponding fees (article 78 of the Mexican Industrial Property Law). Registrations and renewals are published in the Gazette.

That renewal structure is a trap for the inattentive: unlike a trademark, the first deadline arrives in five years, not ten, and there is no use declaration reminding anyone that the file exists.

Novelty again

A design has to be new. Launching the product, putting it in a catalogue or showing it at a fair before filing can defeat that, the same way disclosure defeats a patent. The sequence is: file, then launch.

Design, patent or trademark

These overlap and the overlap is where value is lost. A bottle can be an industrial design, and its distinctive shape may in time also function as a trademark, which does not expire while it is used and renewed. The right answer is usually a combination, decided at the start rather than retrofitted.

What we do

We assess which figure fits the product, prepare the drawings and the filing, prosecute it before IMPI, and calendar the five-year renewals. Where the shape is commercially central we also advise on whether it can be taken to trademark, which is the protection that can last indefinitely.