"Validity of a Community design is essential: an invalid registration cannot claim any scope of protection and cannot be infringed. Since issues of validity are largely decided by the Invalidity Division and the Board of Appeal of the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) in Alicante, with the possibility of an appeal to the General Court of the European Union and, as a final instance, on points of law to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), there is already a rich body of case law providing helpful guidance on how to challenge and defend validity of a Community design.

Given that, according to the CJEU, finding validity of a design (or, more particularly, assessing the overall impression of two conflicting designs) is a question of fact, falling, in general, into the General Court's exclusive jurisdiction, this court's approach is fundamental for understanding European design law.

However, when reviewing most recent guidance from that the court provided in Case T-80/10 and comparing it with the various other cases decided by the different chambers of the very same court until now, the decided cases seems to consist of separate pieces of a puzzle, rather than being a coherent whole".

"According to Recital 14 of the Community Design Regulation (CDR), the overall impression of a design should take into consideration the “nature of the product” to which the design is applied.

A number of recent decisions have shown that the definition of the “nature of the product” can be decisive in issues of validity and infringement.

This article discusses the importance of correctly identifying the nature of the product to which the registered design is applied".