Dr Carolyn Haywood

June 2025

Background

The present decision stems from an appeal by Safestand against an order of the High Court declaring three of its UK registered designs (90002293490001 (“RRD 0001”), 90003121450004 (“RRD 0004”) and 90003121450005 (“RRD 0005”) (collectively, “the Re-Registered Designs”) invalid.

The Re-Registered Designs are all registered in respect of “trestles for building industry” and RRD 0001 is additionally registered in respect of “scaffoldings and their components”. Trestles are self-supporting low-level scaffolding structures.

Section 1 of the Registered Designs Act 1949 states:

“(1) A design may, subject to the following provisions of this Act, be registered under this Act on the making of an application for registration.

(2) In this Act ‘design’ means the appearance of the whole or a part of a product resulting from the features of, in particular, the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture or materials of the product or its ornamentation.

(3) In this Act— ‘complex product’ means a product which is composed of at least two replaceable component parts permitting disassembly and reassembly of the product; and ‘product’ means any industrial or handicraft item other than a computer program; and, in particular, includes packaging, get-up, graphic symbols, typographic type-faces and parts intended to be assembled into a complex product.”

Section 11ZA(1)(a) of the Registered Designs Act 1949 states:

“(1) The registration of a design may be declared invalid—

– on the ground that it does not fulfil the requirements of section 1(2) of this Act”.

Thus, it follows from section 1(2) of the Registered Designs Act that a registered design must relate to a single product and as stipulated in section 11ZA(1)(a), a registered design that does not comply with this requirement is invalid.

Before the High Court, all three of Safestand’s Re-Registered Designs were found invalid on the ground that they did not depict the design of a single product. In the alternative, the Court held that it was not possible to tell with reasonable certainty that the designs represented a single design.

All of the representations provided for each design were colour photographs and whilst each design registration contained at least one representation showing the product as a whole, many of the representations showed part views of one or more parts of the product.

Aspects that led the High Court to determine that the designs did not relate to a single product were as follows:

• differences in colour of the same product part across multiple representations
• the presence of optional aspects

Safestand appealed, asserting that it is clear from the respective images that each design represents a modular design enabling builders trestles of varying sizes to be assembled. Furthermore, Safestand argued that there is nothing “insolubly inconsistent or insurmountably contradictory” in the images of the respective designs, and to the extent that there are minor inconsistencies, these are allowable in line with the principles set out in T-25/23 Orgatex GmbH & Co KG v European Union Intellectual Property.

The Court of Appeal decision

In overturning the finding of the High Court, the Court of Appeal highlighted that the High Court had not properly considered the modular quality of the design. Furthermore, affirming the position of the General Court of the CJEU in case T-25/23 Orgatex GmbH & Co KG v European Union Intellectual Property Office that “the unicity of the design may be established despite minor discrepancies between the views, strictly to the extent that those views can nevertheless be reconciled in the sense of a unitary design”, the Court of Appeal were more forgiving with respect to the apparently minor inconsistencies in colour between the representations in Safestand’s designs.

Conclusion

Although Safestand prevailed this time around, this case nevertheless highlights the need to take care to ensure consistency when filing several representations for a given design.