Today, on 1 May 2025, one important part of the EU design package enters into force: The new Union Design Regulation 2024/282. Reason enough to recap the most important pillars of the reform.

Main Goals 

• Updating and strengthening the current legal framework to stimulate design excellence, innovation and competitiveness in the EU by widening the definitions of design and product.
• Improving and adapting the protection of design to new technologies: AI, 3D printing and the digital revolution.
• Ensuring strong, effective and up-to-date enforcement.
• Granting accessibility and affordability of design protection to all designers by reforming the cost structure and further strengthening multiple applications.

Wider definitions and simplified filing, examination and cost structure

• “Design” means “the appearance of the whole or a part of a product resulting from the features, in particular the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture and/or materials, of the product itself and/or of its decoration, including the movement, transition or any other sort of animation of those features”. 
• “Product” means “any industrial or handicraft item, other than a computer program, regardless of whether it is embodied in a physical object or materialises in a non-physical form, including (a) packaging, sets of articles, spatial arrangements of items intended to form an interior or exterior environment, and parts intended to be assembled into a complex product; (b) graphic works or symbols, logos, surface patterns, typographic typefaces, and graphical user interfaces”. 
• The EUIPO will effectively become the “one-stop shop” for registered EU designs.
• Multiple applications are strengthened and streamlined by eliminating the “unity of class” requirement.
• Simplified cost structure, no separate publication fee, identical costs for multiple applications regardless of how many designs are included. Anyway, higher cost for the renewal fees. This will have an impact on the budget for the next years and therefore could bring changes to the filing and maintenance strategy.
• Simplified renewal procedure aligned with the trademark procedure. 
• No longer an optional examination of novelty and individual character in national design law.

Check our previous article Spotlight on Filing and Examination to learn what makes the underlined parts above particularly innovating.

New technologies

• The new wider definitions of designs and products give a legal framework for designs developed using current new technologies, without restricting the possibility of future technological innovations. Virtual designs, NFTs, light effects or dynamic interfaces which have no physical form can now potentially be protected as designs, because the requirement for the product to be physically tangible has been lifted.
• Easier protection for animations, though the Design Regulation falls short of the Design Directive in this regard: The Regulation, applying to national designs, allows “using generally available technology, including drawings, photographs, videos, computer imaging or computer modelling” for the representation of the designs. For the Union design, the EUIPO guidelines have not adopted this yet and seem to stick to the requirement of the seven views.
• 360° protection for 3D printing, not only covering the product created using a 3D printer, but starting with the CAD files and going all the way to the “software which records the design” to create a 3D print template for a protected design. This may turn out in practice to be too far-reaching and entail liability risks for sharing platforms and databases for 3D printing templates, which have so far contributed to advancing and spreading 3D printing technology. 

Check our previous article Spotlight on the new technology for a deeper insight into these issues.

Enforcement

• The main provision on injunctive relief has been extended to cover “creating, downloading, copying and sharing or distributing to others any medium or software which records the design for the purpose of enabling a product protected by a design to be made”, extending the protection of designs far into the digital world and specifically covering 3D printing.
• The new repair clause strengthens the spare parts market and restricts the right arising from the design, ensuring consumers have access to affordable and sustainable repair options, while at the same time limiting the scope of this exception to identical spare parts that serve the purpose of restoring the original condition.
• As far as goods in transit are concerned, design law catches up with trademark law. As of today, any import of counterfeits of design-protected products into the internal market is prohibited, enabling the design holder to initiate infringement proceedings and border seizures in the country of transit “where the design is identically incorporated” or “cannot be distinguished in its essential aspects” from the original.

Check our previous article Spotlight on Enforcement for further insight on these changes.

Relationship with copyright law

• “A design protected by a design right registered in or in respect of a Member State in accordance with this Directive shall also be eligible for protection by copyright as from the date on which the design was created or fixed in any form, provided that the requirements of copyright law are met.”
• “It is important to establish the principle of cumulation of protection under specific law for registered designs protection and under copyright law, whereby designs protected by design rights should also be eligible to be protected as copyright works, provided that the requirements of copyright law are met.”
• What is new to the 2024 design reform is that it is now clear that the conditions for copyright protection of designs are not a matter of national law but are rather to be applied uniformly across the EU territory, in accordance with settled CJEU case law.

Still, the devil is certainly in the details in that regard with lots and lots of open questions. We therefore warmly recommend our previous article Relationship between design rights and copyright for at least some of those details.