FAQ Entry #188

This is a respond to a previously asked question about the A' Design Award and Competition. The full list of frequently asked questions can be accessed here.

#188: Is it safe for me to submit designs that I do not yet have patents on?

It is indeed always a good idea to have your best industrial designs patented, however this can be very costly especially if you want to have a world-wide global patent because you might need to register your patent in all the countries again and again. According to general patent laws, the works that are already published cannot be patented, with exception to USA, where there is a grace-period of six months. For this reasons, we communicate the winner’s results in advance, so that winners could apply for patents to their products earlier. From another perspective, no matter if your design is patented or not, you are the copyright owner, which means you should be the only person that could duplicate the work. Our final suggestion is that; if your design is easy to reproduce, we would suggest patenting it first beforehand joining any design competition.

Keywords: patenting designs, patents and design competitions, design competition patents, submitting non patented works to design competition, design competition copyrights

The following questions could be related:

• #156: Concerning the privacy and publishing settings I am not quite sure which option to go for. I have no patent for my product, yet if I should be a winner then I would be most interested in having my design published and sent to the press. If my design is seen in various media after I have filed for a patent then I would be more reassured. However, if press release takes place when no measures have been taken to obtain a patent, then this would be risky.
• #157: I have my brand or logo patented in my country only. If I were to show this logo in publications, would this be detrimental to the continued existence of my brand, since it will be exposed at an international level where I have no protection. Would an additional copyright covering 164 countries help ?

If you did not find your answer, please feel free to check the faq pages for more questions and answers. You will also want to check our webpage for details; thanks to our transparency policy, we document and publish everything.