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BIGGER PICTURE
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What other intellectual property rights are available besides design rights?
• Copyright: The design sketches, plans or promotional material such as brochures may benefit from copyright protection if they result from independent creative effort. Copyright protection lasts for the life of the designer plus a further 70 years. As copyright arises automatically there is no need for registration, nor do you have to add the@ mark followed by the year (although it is helpful to do this because it shows you are the copyright owner and when you created the work). However, in practice the protection offered by copyright will be of limited help to prevent trailers from being copied.
• Unregistered trade marks: Your trading name, logo and promotional material may be protected by a form of legal action known as "passing off" if someone else has begun to use similar promotional material which would be likely to confuse or mislead consumers. For
er
MEEIexample, if your trailer has become well known in the UK and you start to lose sales to another trailer being sold in the same retail outlets with every similar label and name, you may well have a successful passing off claim.
• Registered trade marks: You can register a design as a trade mark in the form of a logo or, more unusually, the design's shapes and colours. The design can be registered at the UK Trade Marks Registry (part of the UK Patent Office) to achieve protection in the UK, or at the Community Trade Mark Office (called OHM) for protection throughout the EU. Protection lasts for as long as the renewal fees are paid. However, you must make regular use of your registered mark on promotional material or you may lose protection.