Recital (13) of the Designs Directi

Recital (13) of the Designs Directive indicates that, other things being equal, a registered design should receive a broader scope of protection where the registered design is markedly different to the design corpus and a narrower scope of protection where it differs only slightly from the design corpus. Thus in Grupo Promer the General Court held at [72]:
“… as the Board of Appeal pointed out at paragraph 19 of the contested decision, in so far as similarities between the designs at issue relate to common features, such as those described at paragraph 67 above, those similarities will have only minor importance in the overall impression produced by those designs on the informed user. …”