Legal protection of design in Russia can be obtained by a Russian design patent. Legal protection is granted for 5 years with repeated extensions of 5 years for up to 25 years.
The applicant may claim priority on the basis of one or more previous applications for industrial designs filed in or for any State party to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property.
The main features of the Russian procedure which can be useful for the applicant are the following:
- the low cost of official fees;
- conducting the examination for compliance of the design application with the patentability conditions «Novelty» and «Originality» on the substantive examination stage provides stable legal protection;
- from the date of publication of the design application till the patent grant date the design obtains provisional protection so each third party that has started the illegal use of said design is bind to pay the monetary compensation to the patent holder after the patent grant date (the publication occurs after the termination of the formal examination and is based on the motion of the patent owner/his representative filed).
At the same time, the strict requirements of the Russian legislation regarding the unity of design can be specified as a disadvantage of the Russian procedure. An application for an industrial design is recognized as belonging to a group of industrial designs that are interconnected to form a single creative concept (respectively, the requirement of unity of the industrial design is considered fulfilled) if:
- the group consists of industrial designs, relating to the set (kit) of a product in a whole and from one or more industrial designs relating to the products included in the mentioned set;
- the group consists of several industrial designs, which are variants of the solution of the appearance of the product, differing in insignificant features and/or features that determine the combination of colors.
Industrial designs of the group should belong to one class of the Locarno Classification.