Vehicle Design Patents: Protection for "Design" of Vehicles
Design Patents Generally
Design patents are meant to cover the ornamental design of an item. In other words, design patents cover the shape of an item and whether we think about it in our day-to-day lives or not, vehicles are comprised of a number of shapes. For example, automotive manufacturers have filed and obtained design patents on fenders, grills, hoods, headlights, bumpers, instrument panels, valve assemblies, spoilers, interior display screens, etc. While design patents do cover the shape of an item, they are actually very useful for vehicle manufacturers as items like a bumper, headlight, grill, hood, or fender are valuable because they relate to the design of a certain vehicle and the shape is important. Thus, you wouldn’t want to put a fender from a large truck on a small vehicle, as the shape wouldn’t match. For this reason vehicle manufacturers file and obtain many design patents per year. Replacement part companies offer replacement parts for stores that repair vehicles. Thus, if your vehicle is involved in an accident and your fender needs replacing, the new fender is most likely not from the original vehicle manufacturer like GM or Toyota, but from a replacement part manufacturer. The reason for this occurrence is two fold: 1) replacement parts from OEMs are generally more expensive and 2) insurance companies want to pay less to fix your vehicle. To be clear, the replacement part business is big business and one known company realizes approximately $1billion per year from replacement part sales.
Replacement Parts Infringing Vehicle Design Patents?
Given that replacement parts are inherently exactly the same shape or form as the original parts, the replacement parts often violate design patents owned by the vehicle manufacturers. Because the replacement part companies and perhaps more importantly the insurance companies that purchase parts from these companies understand the liability from design patent infringement, there have been several attempts by the replacement part community to amend the laws to provide an exception of infringement for replacement parts. See Promoting Automotive Repair, Trade, and Sales Act of 2013, H.R. 1663, 113th Cong. (2013); see also H.R. 3889, 113th Cong. (2012); H.R. 3059, 111th Cong. (2009). These replacement part manufacturers insist replacement parts keep repair costs low for consumers, but what about the quality of the part being replaced? Would the new fender have the same structural and material characteristics as the original fender? Would the fender perform the same in an accident to protect my family and me? To date, no such exception for infringement of automotive design patents has been passed.
Vehicle manufacturers are keeping tabs on some of the replacement part manufacturers. Ford sued a number of replacement part manufacturers in 2008 at the International Trade Commission to prevent several replacement part manufacturers from temporarily importing infringing parts into the United States. Others in the industry have licensing arrangements with the replacement part manufacturers. As future concept vehicles move into production and the conflict between the design patents owned by the vehicle manufacturers continue in view of the replacement part industry, it will be interesting to see how design patents are used, licensed, or challenged going forward.
For more information on this topic, please visit our Patent Protection service page, which is part of our Patents practice.
Question about Design Patents?
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