hokusai

Finally, Italian IP Courts are outside the eighteenth century and have entered the twenty-first!

In January the Court of Milan has issued a decision regarding the protection under copyright law of a great design chair, the Panton Chair by Verner Panteon. This chair was created in 1960 and is now produced by the Italian design firm Vitra. In 2006 the Italian customs seized a stock of fake Panteon chairs coming from China and addressed to a well known Milan design store.

Prior to the coming into force of the Italian Decree Law 95/2001, which harmonized Italian law with European Community Directives, an object was either protected by the law on designs, or – where its artistic value was separable from the industrial nature of the product – by copyright law. After the Decree Law 95/2001, a work of design, when characterized by the so called “artistic value”, can be now protected both under design and copyright law.

This landmark decision has confirmed that the artistic value of a work of design is not diminished by the industrial nature of the product, provided that it is possible to demonstrate that its design is such as to give rise to appreciation among the general public and in cultural circles.

In other decisions – like the sadly famous one regarding Le Courbusier’s Chaise Longue – the industrial nature of the creation was considered a per se bar for the access to design protection.

If you take a look at the collections of museums like the NY MOMA or La Triennale di Milano, you can easily understand that they were wrong, but Judges are too busy to go to museums, one may think! Not judge Marangoni, anyways, who stated that: “The artistic value of the design exists whenever the artwork has characteristics such as to give rise to appreciation at an aesthetic level that prevails over the functionality of the product. Thus the selection parameter becomes the perception of the consumer and the design merits copyright protection when the work possesses such characteristics that they alone justify purchase of the product, irrespective of considerations of functionality or convenience of price.”

In these cases, the term of protection for the design (maximum 25 years) may potentially be extended according to the regulations on copyright – up to 25 years after the death of the author.

So, that’s a step further in IP law for Italy; the next problem, in my opinion, is how to evaluate the artistic value for brand new works or for works made by young designers. When a chair, a lamp or a table is not exhibited in a museum or published in a critique book but is as creative as that kind of works, on which basis can we evaluate its artistic value? Are judges supposed to be art critics or are art critics supposed to intervene in judgments to solve this problem?