When registering a design or model, it is necessary to specify its territorial scope. While a design or model can be registered in Italy, today it is much more common, especially if a few shapes are involved, to apply for European coverage through the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market in Alicante. A much less common alternative is registration in Italy and some other individual European countries or even registration of an international design, once much more used than today, which allows a model to be registered in several other countries including the USA, Russia and Japan.
The European office, like the Italian office, does not carry out prior art analyses nor can they intervene in terms of novelty and individual characteristics; they can, however, reject the application exclusively for reasons of legitimacy.
It is commonly believed that the protection of a design has little effect since it seems to be sufficient to change just one element of the shape to obtain a different overall impression.
We leave it to the judges to decide on infringement issues because these involve complex technical analyses that require experience and cannot be carried out in a superficial manner.
