The CP solves legal certainty and perception better than the aff
Kazeeva 24 [Iana Kazeeva is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law at the University of Vienna. She studied international commercial and tax law in Moscow and holds a Candidate of Sciences degree (Ph.D. equivalent) in international financial law (dissertation on fiscal decentralization). Prior to joining the Department, she worked at the Mountain View office of a California-based public software-as-a-service company, primarily engaged in reviewing and negotiating technology and commercial contracts. She also gained practical experience as a senior legal counsel at the legal department of a global producer of mineral fertilizers, focusing on project finance and legal compliance. At the Department, the primary focus of her research is on intellectual property, data security, and data protection law., Sui Generis Intellectual Property Protection Comparison of EU and U.S. Regulatory Perspectives in Law, Business and Innovation, ALB]
However, the EU sui generis design regime still provides an outstanding approach to design legal protection and has also helped achieve an important goal that the EU legislators were facing, particularly harmonization of the national design laws and facilitating the free circulation of goods that is essential for the internal market. As noted by Derclaye, the EU design law is the most harmonized regional design regime in the world, which is an amazing achievement of the EU legislators given that some EU countries historically paid a lot of attention to intellectual property protection of designs (France, Italy) and some EU countries had no design laws at all (Greece).3
The 2020 Evaluation of EU Legislation on Design Protection stressed that the main goals of the sui generis design rights in the EU were to promote “a single market and an undistorted competition regime for products embodying designs”. The conducted studies have shown that the introduced sui generis regime has been broadly successful in reaching these goals. According to the evaluation, the sui generis rights provide “access to simple and affordable design protection by making it significantly easier and less costly to obtain a registered design right that is valid across the whole EU”. The evaluation concludes that “it is likely that without EU legislation on design protection, big differences between national laws would have remained, with the result that the internal market for goods embodying designs would remain fragmented and distorted”. At the same time, the evaluation also reported a number of weak points of the design regime, namely only partial harmonization of the provisions on component parts used for repair of complex products and unclear interaction with copyright law, in particular the principle of cumulation,—an issue that was also broadly discussed by the scholars, as noted above.
However, despite the flaws indicated both by scholars and in the evaluation, the EU sui generis design regime remains an outstanding example of harmonization of national design laws, providing legal certainty to designers of multiple industries in the EU. Such example of legal certainty that could be provided to designers, along with the high numbers of applications for RCDs and granted RCDs, make the supporters of a sui generis design protection in the U.S. view the EU sui generis designs rights as a model that the U.S. should follow.37