ABSTRACT
Designs play a vital role in marketing and consumer choice. Considerable resources and expense go into creating design features that provide a competitive edge in the marketplace. Many products are neither inventive nor constitute copyright works, but are marketed with features that have an artistic, aesthetic value. It is these features, either of appearance or arrangement of a commercially exploited article, which are the subject of design protection. One can therefore say that legal protection for design falls between patents and copyright. Examples of products which fall into the design sphere include jewellery, textiles, white goods, sunglasses, cars, aircraft, etc.
