How to Protect Your Jewelry Designs

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How to Protect Your Jewelry Designs



Knock-offs and ‘copycat’ designs are nothing new to the fashion world. The rising demand for “fast fashion” and bargain hunting alike make knock-offs particularly attractive to the consumer’s insatiable appetite. This trend is no different in the jewelry industry where copying of popular designs is an all-too-familiar issue facing jewelry designers. As compared to the clothing industry, jewelry designers generally have more intellectual property (“IP”) options at their disposal to help address the issue of copyists. While not all jewelry designs are protectable through each of the various forms of IP, designers should be familiar with and explore the possible options to best protect their original designs against fast fashion copyists and other copycat jewelry suppliers. To get more news about custom jewelry designers, you can visit jewelryhunt.net official website.

Copyrights can be a particularly useful tool in protecting jewelry designs. Copyrights protect artistic expressions that are original to the creator and that are fixed in a tangible form (i.e., more than just an idea in your mind). A limitation on copyrightable subject matter is functionality; functional articles cannot be protected but conceptually separable portions of such functional articles can be copyrightable. In other words, if an object has a practical or useful function, copyright protection applies only to the original, creative elements “that can be identified separately from the utilitarian aspects of an object”, but does not extend to the underlying design of the functional object. Thus, unlike their clothing design counterparts, the structure of which is generally considered functional and not copyright protectable, jewelry designs can be protected under copyright.

One important benefit of a copyright is that a copyrightable work is granted copyright protection upon creation. In other words, registration with the U.S. Copyright Office is not mandatory to owning a copyright. There are significant advantages to copyright registration, however, and registration is a pre-requisite for filing an infringement lawsuit. Another benefit of copyright protection is that it has a relatively long duration, lasting for the life of the author of the work plus an additional 70 years. If the author is a company, the copyright lasts for 95 years from the date the work was published, or 120 years from the date the work was created, whichever ends first.
As the name implies, copyright ownership allows the owner to stop others from copying their jewelry designs. Thus, where a defendant can show that they did not copy the design (for example, where the defendant independently created the same or a similar design without knowledge of the copyrighted design), then there would be no infringement.

The copyrightability of a jewelry design can be a highly fact-intensive inquiry dependent on multiple factors. Often times copyright cases pertaining to jewelry designs will hinge on whether a jewelry design has any original artistic element that qualifies for copyright protection.

For example, in 2008, following a challenge to the Van Cleef & Arpel’s copyrights in its well-known Vintage Alhambra necklace design, a court held that the jewelry design was copyrightable, even though the clover design on the jewelry piece was similar to a prior clover-shaped military insignia: The court reasoned that even though the clover was a common shape, there was originality in the way Van Cleef “recast and arranged [the] constituent elements” into the final jewelry design. See Van Cleef & Arpels Logistics, S.A. v. Landau Jewelry, et. al., 547 F. Supp. 2d 356 (S.D.N.Y. 2008).

By contrast, in a 2005 court case, a jewelry designer’s copyright registrations in barbed wire jewelry did not pass muster under court scrutiny. There the court held that barbed wire jewelry was not copyrightable because there was not enough creativity or originality apart from traditional barbed wire to warrant copyright protection. In other words, the designer did not add anything protectable to traditional barbed wire to warrant copyright protection. See Todd v. Mont. Silversmiths, 379 F. Supp. 2d 1110 (D. Colo. 2005).

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