serves purely technical or functional purposes may rather be protected under the short-term unregistered design scheme .

A registered design is valuable to the UK designers, giving them a monopoly right to exclude both the bona fide and mala fide third party from producing products that incorporated his registered design. Otherwise, the right owner may commence infringement proceeding; given the incorporation of design by a third party was for commercial purposes, non-teaching purposes or non-experimental purposes. There is a complete list of commercial activities that constitute infringements, these are making, offering, putting the infringing product on the market; imports, exports or using a product applying the design. Stocking of the products for any these purposes is also prohibited . Since the harmonisation of registered design, there are four cases about infringement of UK registered designs and community-registered designs have been heard in the Court of Appeal, yet no infringement is found by far. A recent Supreme Court judgement handed down in the high profile case of PMS international v Magmatic limited , raises the concern of the difficulty to enforce a registered design right in the UK, and to what extend the right of a designer is protected.

Informed User

The scope of the design protection covers all other designs that failed to create a different overall impression to the informed user . Definition of an informed user could be found in the case of Samsung Electronics (UK) Ltd v Apple Inc , who is a targeted purchaser carrying knowledge of the design corpus (neither a manufacturer nor a seller of the product ), meanwhile, he must be interested in the product itself, showing a high degree of attention when using the product. When accessing the scope of protection under art 10. It is necessary to consider the proximity of the registered design to the design corpus. Recital 14 of the design regulation provides that, a larger scope of protection available to a registered design that is markedly different from the design corpus, in contrast, a narrower scope of protection to designs having very little different to the design corpus. In Procter & Gamble Co v Reckitt Benckiser (UK) Ltd, Jacob LJ had explained the rationale behind the principle; a new design that is different form any design been made available in the market, creates a greater overall visual impact to those ‘kindred prior art’, so as to create a more significant overall impression, it is less likely the differences between the registered design and the infringing product are deemed to