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. Accordingly, legal protection for design falls between copyright and patent law. Examples of products which fall into the design sphere include jewellery, textiles, white goods, sunglasses, cars, aircraft. Design law protects the appearance of an article, not its function (the way it works).
