Patent and Design Registration Questions

An invention protects a technical solution and is substantively examined; a utility model protects the shape or structure of a product and is registered after preliminary review; a design patent protects appearance only. Terms differ accordingly: 20, 10 and 15 years in China, all from the filing date.

Ordinarily 18-24 months from filing to grant, with a 15-year term from grant and no maintenance fees. Two accelerated routes exist — design prioritised examination and expedited examination for small entities — both at additional official cost.

In the US your own disclosure may fall inside the grace period measured from first publication or sale. In the EU and UK, prior self-disclosure generally destroys novelty, so the answer for those markets is usually no. Filing before launch is always the cheaper option.

Yes for sellers: registration takes one to two weeks, covers all EU member states, and gives platforms a dated certificate to act on. The caveat is vulnerability to later invalidity, so screen prior designs first and keep your creation evidence.

Multiple designs can be filed together in some systems, typically for variations in the same Locarno class — colourways, sizes, family sets. Where the products are genuinely different, separate filings are cleaner and cheaper to enforce.

No. PCT is a filing and search mechanism that fixes your priority date and defers the decision about individual countries to roughly 30 or 31 months. Each office still examines and grants separately.

When the improvement is structural, the product life cycle is short, and you want an enforceable right quickly. Utility models grant in about 10-14 months in China, and the double-filing route lets you hold that fast right while the invention is still pending.

Dated development records, prototypes and photographs, first-disclosure and first-sale dates, and the marketing material showing the claimed feature. That file is what supports enforcement, and it is what defeats an invalidity attack later.

They help decisively when the right is issued and the accused product visibly falls inside it. A granted design patent or utility model is far easier for a platform review team to act on than an argument about unfair competition.

Look at what you are actually protecting: shape and ornament goes to designs, source-identifying appearance or branding goes to trademarks, and graphic artwork on the surface goes to copyright. Most sellers stack design plus word mark because each blocks a different kind of copy.