The dress design patents offer intellectual property rights to the proprietor who come up with innovative concepts in the fashion community. This article is a complete guide on how you can available patents for your exclusive designed dresses.
How To Patent A Dress Design in India
Fashion is considered a form of art. As the urge to try new trends will never fade, fashion innovations will not cease anytime. Be it the exclusive designer bags launched by Prada or Sabyasachi Mukherjee. There are numerous examples of fashion statements that speak for themselves. Clock manufacturing brands also own intellectual rights, such as Tissot. This article will discuss about how to patent a dress design in india.
Significance of Dress Design Patents in India
Dress design patents play a remarkable role in protecting a specific item against its aesthetic features, unauthorised use, and income protection to the proprietors. All the continents are engaged in the Indian fashion market to a large extent. Patent granting is not only limited to apparel. This IPR also protects several luxurious items.
The trademark safeguards the company logo and effectively imparts a distinguishable feature to a dress.
Hence, when an inventor requests copyright or patent approval, it greatly helps the Indian cloth dealers and consumers. The period of patent effectiveness lasts for many years regardless of the fact that even if the inventor dies, the patent status is not affected. Therefore availing of a dress design patent in India is the hour’s requirement.
On Instagram, we know about a popular profile named Diet Sabya, where customers become aware of copied dress design. It is only due to them we came to learn recently that Shein, a popular clothing brand for almost all women across our country owing to its great collection and unreal affordability; they were simply copying the dress design innovated by other designers. The same intruding nature is evident for many cosmetics-producing companies as well.
Why Do Dress Design Need a Patent?
A patent delegates legal power to the patentee or designer to enjoy a monopoly on a creative concept. This helps to preserve the ownership rights of an irreplaceable tangible asset. Today, the dress manufacturing units are collaborating with one another leading to the amalgamation of influences. This has led to the globalisation of fashion trends. Under such a situation, major companies have decided to safeguard their products across the global target market. Nearly 80% of the net revenue of clothing brands is expected to be generated from their unique design; thus, they must protect them by abiding by the policies put forward by the Indian Patent Office.
Prerequisites for Obtaining Dress Designs Patents
In this section of the blog, we have jotted down the standards laid down by the Indian patent office that must be met in order to get patent approval for an exclusive dress design:
- The dress design should portray patentable subject matter: The patent office duly mentioned that each designed dress has to include something that can be considered patentable. The designer strives to maintain this policy by not blindly copying other designers’ ideas. The final product is consumer-ready that represents a unique representation. Other than this, three more conditions must be met by the company launching a designer dress to satisfy the patent office for obtaining the patent.
- The pattern has to be novel: The dress design presented before the patent granting officers are expected to be novel. In a nutshell, the designer has to convince that his inspiration behind the illustrative depictions gives birth to a new design. Suppose a fashion designer has taken a fabric after drawing inspiration from some dress that was presented online; his patent proposal will not be granted because the base idea is no longer new. This might give rise to a dilemma among the readers that whenever we are stressing the term ‘new,’ you may wonder that all-inclusive materials need to be new, but that is not the case. The result of getting prepared from knitting all the elements should produce a lovely dress that is unquestionably new.
- The design is non-obvious: This is a critical concept. The applicant must ensure that the dress design he has brought in front of the jury represents a pattern that a proficient client familiar with the fashion trends would not consider the upheaval noticeable. It is a tricky condition as patenting is only possible when the inspiring modules are implemented in a proportion and way nobody has ever tried or thought of doing.
The patent examiner judges a dress design’s nonobviousness concerning an ordinary cloth purchaser. Subjective enquiries are conducted involving people who use branded clothes every time. If the patent officer concludes that the invention was generic, we proceed to the next step of patenting your dress design.
- The product should make sense: To patent a product, an inventor must prove that his proposed dress design is meaningful.
- Applications rarely get disapproved of because they do not offer any practical connection to the real world. But still, it is a mandatory step that should not be skipped.
To prove usefulness, an applicant must be convinced that the design points to some notable element in the human world.
If your invention passes all the conditions mentioned above, you will be duly granted patent protection for your proposed dress design.
How Long Can You Patent Dress Designs in India
Patent Filing in India – Patent terms and conditions are established by statute. At present, an active dress design patent’s lifespan is estimated to be 15 years starting from the day the inventor filed the patenting request in India. This law is in accordance with the 1970’s Indian Patents Act. However, several standards must be met before you may eventually protect these designed products. The conditions have been vividly described in the above sections.
Conclusion
Dress patents fall under design patents, owing to their creativity and application. To secure patent protection, fabric combinations and highlighted trends must not be patented. The idea should be novel and non-obvious based on the opinion of the patent examiner and ordinary people engaged in subjective enquiries. Lastly, the proposed item should indicate consumer benefits.
