Burberry Coats, Trade Marks And Registered Designs

The overlap between trade mark law and product design is illustrated nicely by two recent decisions.

Burberry, Italy

This hardly needs saying, but we often make purchases with reference to trade marks. You might go out shopping with your friend and say, "I'm looking for a Burberry coat". If you're a bit odd, you might say to your friend "I'm looking for one of those coats with a repeating plaid pattern consisting a tan background, light tan vertical and horizontal lines, black vertical and horizontal lines, with squares, and red vertical and horizontal lines." In fact, you are probably only like to do this if you are a patent attorney.

The repeating plain pattern description is in fact a registered trade mark and it belongs to the same company that owns the word mark Burberry. This pattern trade mark came up in litigation in Italy recently, when Burberry took action against a Chinese company that was selling lookalikes.