Design

It was settled law that, before carrying out any comparison of the registered design with an earlier design or with the design of an alleged infringement, it was necessary to ascertain which features were actually protected by the design and so were relevant to the comparison. Further, the two designs had to be considered globally and the informed user would attach less significance to those features which formed part of the design corpus and correspondingly greater significance to those features which did not. The informed user would also attach particular importance to features in respect of which the designer had a great deal of design freedom. The analysis was not limited to those considerations, however, for a global assessment further required the designs to be considered having regard to the way in which the products to which the designs were intended to be applied were used, with some features having greater prominence than others, perhaps because they were more visible.