As we predicted in our 2023 report, 2024 was a banner year for design rights in the U.S. and elsewhere. In last year’s report, we noted that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) agreed to consider en banc whether the long-standing design patent obviousness test required modification. As you will see in this year’s report, the court did not modify it— instead, it threw more than 30 years of design jurisprudence out the window and adopted a new (but old) test.
While the new test was predicted to make design patents easier to invalidate, we saw in at least one application of it by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), that instituting inter partes review of a design patent can still be a challenge. We also saw district courts continue to grapple with claim construction and the issue of functionality. Adding a new obviousness test may only aggravate reversal rates by the CAFC in the future. And finally, the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) continues to be a pivotal forum for enforcing design patents provided the domestic industry requirement can be shown for the asserted patent, which proved challenging in two cases in 2024.
On the international front, intellectual property offices around the world continue to update their law in big ways and small. Most notable was the reform of the European design law, and the culmination of the Design Law Treaty at the end of the year.
The information provided in this review is the result of a collaborative process. Thank you to co-authors— Ivy Estoesta, Daniel Gajewski, and Deirdre Wells, as well as Patrick Murray who contributed important data and statistics.
We appreciate your interest in this report, and we encourage you to read our other year-in-review publications covering the CAFC, ITC, and PTAB in detail as well as a new report covering AI and IP. All of this content is available at www.sternekessler.com and by request. Please contact us if you have questions or wish to discuss the future of design protection.
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