Varumärkes- och designskydd för modedesign : En EU-rättslig och empirisk studie om modebranschen

Sammanfattning: This paper examines how the trademark and design regulations in the European Union (EU) are used within the European fashion industry. It mainly focuses on the protection for a fashion design, rather than the protection for a word or a logo. The first part of the paper consists of a European legal perspective, where the legal landscape and relevant case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) regarding the trademark and design rights, are examined. As with the trademark protection, the case law shows that fashion companies may trademark register their classical prints and other signature features such as a specific colour. However, the threshold to obtain a valid trademark protection for a fashion design is high. The design regulation is a more accessible form of protection for fashion designs and fashion products, and the requirements for protection of the registered as well as the unregistered design have been specified by the CJEU.  Furthermore, the second part of this paper consists of an empiric study, which is conducted with the purpose of evaluating how the fashion industry uses these rights for their fashion designs. The aim of the study is to investigate whether there exists any correlation between how big a fashion company is, in terms of its annual turnover, and how many European trademarks and/or designs a company has registered. This paper concludes that there is no such correlation. However, the results from the empiric research provide some evidence that high-end fashion companies that create more fashion designs tend to in general register more trademark and design rights compared to fast fashion companies. The research also shows that the design registration, in general, is more used for fashion designs than the trademark registration. However, there are a large number of fashion companies that do not have any registrationat all, which may indicate that these different forms of protections are still quite unknown for some fashion companies.