Upphovsrätt och mönsterrätt för industriell design inom EU : hur ett icke-harmoniserat område utnyttjas i kommersiella syften

Sammanfattning: A group of companies that only recently has caught the attention of Swedish designers, enterprises and media are the so -called "furniture pirates". In Sweden it’s mainly two companies that have ended up in the spotlight. The online stores Ikon M and Designers Revolt are two companies which currently sell replicas of famous Swedish and foreign designers. Although the designs sold are copyright protected in Sweden, and most other European countries, the right holders can only stand by and watch as more or less exact copies are sold for a fraction of the price of the originals.The business model - to exploit the EU’s free movement of goods and the UK's short term of copyright protection in matter of mass-produced art (industrial design) - has proven successful for the companies that practice it. The question is for how long and to what extent these companies will be able to conduct such activities in the future. Despite the fact that the area of applied art in general is a non-harmonized area and that global conventions such as the Berne Convention explicitly leaves to each country to decide how copyright protection for works of applied art should be treated in national law, the European Court has in a number of judgments created an uncertainty in question what measure of freedom the national legislature really has in this matter. It seems like the UK rather want to be safe than sorry and has suggested a change in national copyright law which, when it comes into effect, will treat mass-produced art in the same way as any other art.Corporate responsibility has also shown to be dependent on in which way they market themselves towards their consumers. A company which directly addresses consumers in another Member State, may be making themselves guilty of copyright infringement, even though the goods sold are legal in the country of the seller.This paper aims to provide for an overview on how protective conditions prevalent for industrial design in the context of the international and European legal regulation of copyright and design right.One way to ascertain what is applicable to industrial mass-produced designs is to introduce clear-cut legislation at EU level where works of applied art, as a work category, is provided with provisions concerning the matter of to what extent such works should be protected and how this is to be done.