The rise and rise of EU registered designs

EUIPO, the office which handles EU trade mark and design applications, has just published its annual statistics on EU registered design filings, also known as RCDs (renamed European Union Designs (“EUDs”) following the recent EU design legislative reform).

These statistics now include some data from back in 2003, when the Registered Community Design (RCD) was introduced, to December 2024, and provide insights into who is using the registered design system to protect their intellectual property (IP), and what types of product are being protected.

The first point to note is that RCDs have clearly been a game changer for businesses, as shown by the number of registered design applications filed at EUIPO, which rose to 105,221 in 2024 - an increase of 6,703 on 2023, and the highest over the last ten years. 99% of these were filed via the EUIPO's online filing system, the remainder by email.

Source: EUIPO

The number of design applications filed via the Fast Track system, which allows for a design to be registered within a couple of days of filing, increased dramatically in 2024 to over 60%, This is likely a result of the EUIPO's new “RCD Easy Filing” form, which was introduced in January 2024 and which offers Fast Track registration as a default. 

Source: EUIPO

Increasing use of the “RCD Easy Filing” form likely accounts for the drop in requests for deferred publication too, since this is not available via the new form. Requests for deferral of publication of a registered design has fallen to 2,484, compared with 10,109 in 2022.

English remains the preferred first language for an RCD application, selected by over 50% of applicants in 2024.

In terms of the type of products being protected by an RCD, class 06 remains top, with 14,957 RCDs; all designs are classified into one or more “classes” of the international Locarno classification system, and class 06 relates to “furnishings”. Second is class 02, “articles of clothing and haberdashery” and third is class 26, “lighting apparatus". The fourth is class 14 for “recording, telecommunication or data processing equipment”. These sectors appear to be the top filers for the last few years. Last but not least, only 126 RCDs were filed in 2024 for ‘musical instruments” in class 17, ranking it as the last category.

The EUIPO statistics also reveal that the top user of the RCD system by some margin is China, although Germany and Italy still lead when taking into account all years from 2003 onwards. 

Source: EUIPO

US applicants seem to be lagging behind in this respect, filing more RCDs than France but fewer than Italy, and less than a third of those filed by Chinese applicants. And applicants from other major IP filing centres, such as Japan, Korea, Canada and Australia, seem not to value RCDs in the same way that China and the US do.

The reason for this difference in filing numbers is not clear; perhaps RCDs are just relatively new, in IP terms, having been around for just over 20 years. There may also be some confusion around how registered designs relate to “design patents”, which are common in the US but which are prosecuted in a very different way - RCDs are not examined for novelty or individual character prior to registration.

Source: EUIPO

A design under the RCD system is currently defined as ‘the appearance of the whole or a part of a product resulting from the features of, in particular, the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture and/or materials of the product itself and/or its ornamentation’. RCDs entitle holders to exclusive rights to use, make, offer, put on the market, import, export or stock products incorporating the protected design, and to prevent others from doing so with products incorporating the protected design and that do not produce a different overall impression. Unlike a patent, which covers the function, operation or construction of an invention, an RCD only covers the appearance of a product. However, unlike a patent, as discussed above an RCD can be registered within a couple of days of the application being filed, and lasts for up to 25 years. Further, there is no substantive examination of whether a design is novel and has individual character prior to registration. 

For these reasons, RCDs offer a simple and fast way to obtain at least some form of IP protection, and can be used alongside European patents and EU trade marks to enforce your IP rights in a market of almost 500 million consumers.

We can only foresee that more and more designs will be filed in the coming years, especially considering the new EU design legislation modernizing the EU design system and aiming to simplify the existing design protection across the EU to include new types of designs, including digital designs.

The SME fund has also just opened, and SMEs can benefit from this scheme to get grants of up to 750 EUR for design or trademark registration costs, and even more for patent draft and registration costs.

If you are interested in finding out more about registered design protection in the EU, don't hesitate to get in touch.