How are designs registered?
An application for design registration only requires a few pictures showing different views of the design, and an indication as to what the design might be applied to (though this does not limit the legal protection just to that application). Registration is possible even for handicraft items and one-off items. There must have been a ‘freedom of design’ in the creation, so where a jug has a distinctive shape it is registrable because it could have had many other shapes and still have been a jug. However, where form is dictated by function, or dictated by the need to fit with other parts (eg: a brake pad which needs to fit in the callipers) no registration is possible. The design must be new on the day the application is filed, that is to say not likely to be previously known anywhere in the world by a designer working in the same field. Furthermore, the design must have ‘individual character’. This means it must not give the notion of ‘déjà vu’ in the mind of an ‘informed user’, namely
