The patentability criteria for industrial designs are novelty and originality (a special requirement analogous to the inventive step requirement).
Industrial designs must be free and clear of any third parties’ exclusive rights of all kinds.
No specific standards are provided for the images of a claimed design. Accurate realistic images are acceptable including photographic ones, provided that the images do not comprise irrelevant objects and artifacts (shadows) depending on the means of imaging and not intrinsic to the article itself. Images should be submitted in sufficient quantity for comprehensive visualization of the article’s external appearance.
One of the Russian Patent Law peculiar provisions is that the scope of legal protection of an industrial design is defined not only by the submitted images of the article, but also by the list of verbalized essential features of the solution. The specified list must indicate all the distinguishing external characteristics of the article. The presence of the named distinguishing characteristics within an article is deemed as the use of the patented design (as it is provided by the laws of Vietnam and Kirgizia).
Essential features of industrial designs only vaguely resemble invention claims and are direct contrary of design patent specifications which serve for the purpose of disclamation of the features in most legal systems.
Disclamation of the certain features is effected if necessary by means of depicting of disclaimed elements in dashed lines.
One design application may be filed for a number of articles if they constitute a set of articles intended for joint use or are correlating as a whole and a part or are different versions of the same article used for the uniform purpose and with common external characteristics, given that identifying features are inherent in each article.