PMS International Cow Kiddee Case - Kids Travel Case

Product Information

Unfortunately for Magmatic, design registrations cannot (and were never intended to) prevent a competitor from copying the underlying concept. The Court of Appeal's decision generated quite a lot of controversy and a lot of negative publicity. If you have followed the Trunki brand from it’s beginnings, however, this might seem like a case of forewarnings coming true. Lord Neuberger, the court’s president, expressed “some regret” as the conception of the Trunki “seems to have been both original and clever”.

The Court of Appeal seemed to describe the different overall impressions by reference to the applicable decoration on the Kiddee Cases.

Lawyers and many intellectual property specialists said the ruling was an enormous blow to small creative businesses in the UK that rely on design rights.

The courts have to strike the right balance between incentivising innovation, while simultaneously promoting fair competition. What appears to have been a simple copyright design violation case has evolved to become a ruling which is said to be sending ‘shockwaves’ though British design communities.The Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Court of Appeal to the effect that there was no infringement of the Community registered design for Magamatic's Trunki suitcase by PMS's "Kiddee" suitcase, which copied the idea but not the design as registered.

The issue, of course, is that the applicant here chose to file with images that had two colour tones.The Claimant's CRD consisted of monochrome computer generated images and the Court of Appeal found that the colour contrasts were part of the CRD and there should be taken into account in considering the overall impression. So, let’s say that the new and ‘impressionable’ aspect of your design was the surface decoration of a tea mug.