Designs (EU designs)
Registered and unregistered protection, after the EU reform.
We protect the appearance of your client’s products in France and across the EU. The route, the term of protection and a twelve-month grace period all shape the strategy — and the EU system has just been modernised.
Registered and unregistered protection
A registered design — French (INPI) or EU (EUIPO) — protects a product’s appearance for renewable five-year terms, up to a maximum of twenty-five years. Separately, an unregistered EU design arises automatically for three years from first disclosure in the EU; this right has no French national equivalent and is useful for short-cycle or fast-moving products.
France or the EU — and the 12-month grace period
A French national design protects France alone; an EU design protects all 27 member states in a single right. The EU route is usually preferable — one pan-European right, the automatic unregistered protection, and a twelve-month grace period.
Under that grace period, the designer’s own disclosures in the year before filing do not destroy novelty: the design can be shown at a trade fair, market-tested, or relied on as an unregistered EU right, and still validly registered within twelve months. We plan the disclosure-and-filing sequence so novelty is never accidentally lost.
What the EU design reform changed
Regulation (EU) 2024/2822 renamed the right (the RCD became the Registered EU Design), removed filing through national offices and several formalities from May 2025, with a second phase from July 2026 allowing new file formats for animated and digital designs.
The international route
Where the client needs protection beyond the EU, we file through the Hague System, which lets a single international application designate several territories.