Piaggio clamps down on Vespa copies
The owner of the Vespa scooter brand is claiming victory over an unnamed Chinese manufacturer in an EU design dispute.
Milan-based Piaggio announced yesterday, May 25, that the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) had invalidated a design registered by a Chinese party for being too similar to the Vespa.
The Italian company spotted the Chinese scooters at the EICMA 2019 two-wheeler vehicle show in Milan, and had them removed by exhibition centre authorities, Piaggio’s statement said.
Piaggio also filed a complaint at the EUIPO, which it said formed part of “wider activities against counterfeiting undertaken by the Piaggio Group for years”.
The EUIPO’s latest decision, not yet publicly available, cancelled the Chinese registration because it was “incapable of eliciting a different general impression with respect to the registered design” of the Vespa Primavera, Piaggio said.
Piaggio registered its own design for the Vespa Primavera in 2013, and also owns trademark and copyright rights for the scooter.
Piaggio says it engages in: “continuous monitoring of the databases of internationally registered designs and trademarks, which, as a result of the opposition proceedings initiated by Piaggio, has led to the cancellation of more than 50 trademarks registered by third parties in the last two years.”
Designs and design patents are fiercely guarded IP in the automotive sector. Last July, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit handed a major victory to Ford, after the court refused to ‘rewrite’ design patent law in favour of auto parts distributors.
The Automotive Body Parts Association had argued that ‘aesthetic functionality’, a concept in trademark law, could also apply in the case of design patents.
But Ford, defending its design patents for headlamps and the hood of the F-150 pick-up truck, said this concept was inapplicable to design patents.
The ‘aesthetic functionality’ prevents parties from having trademark protection over functional features of a product which do not indicate the commercial origin of a good or service.
The Federal Circuit rejected this argument because trademarks and design patents “trademarks and design patents serve different purposes and have different governing law”.
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