“Our products have also been imitated. If it’s just a similar design and doesn’t involve the brand, it’s hurting to be pursued,†said an industry insider who is engaged in furniture sales.
"Who said that we plagiarized, we have a patent certificate, which is self-designed." A person in charge of the company allegedly copied the appearance of other people's furniture products argued.
At present, the design of furniture products has gradually become the core of furniture products. As the original design of domestic furniture has just started, the intellectual property protection system is still immature. In the face of homogenization competition, plagiarism, etc., domestic brand furniture enterprises only Can be helpless.
The international furniture fair held in Shanghai on September 11 last year became a "counterfeiting position." On the first day of the opening of the exhibition, Beijing manufacturers submitted an application for rights protection to the relevant departments of the Shanghai Home Furnishing Exhibition Organizing Committee, alleging that several pieces of furniture belonging to another furniture company's brand were suspected of infringing the design patent.
The next day, after five hours of argumentation and comparison, the Shanghai Furniture Fair intellectual property rights lawyer determined that plagiarism was not established. Relevant persons said that the results of the comparison, the details of the appearance and lines of the two products are mostly different, and at the same time have a patent certificate.
In recent years, at the major exhibitions, you can see the figure of “cottage†furniture, and “no rights to the exhibition†seems to be the endorsement of the furniture exhibition. The “cottage†furniture has been repeatedly identified, but in the end who copied the design ideas, no one can say clearly.
In this regard, an industry authority said that due to factors such as relatively low compensation for furniture patent lawsuits, long time span, and short product life cycle, some furniture companies feel “very helpless†when facing patent infringement. "Protection of rights" is not only difficult but also very tired.
A few days ago, the reporter visited a number of large-scale furniture cities in Shanghai and found that the furniture styles are similar. In a European furniture exhibition hall in Wenshui Road Furniture City, the price of a solid wood bed is over 10,000. The characteristic is that the carving process of the two bed plates is complicated. In another exhibition hall on the same floor, the carved pattern changed from rose to peony, and the style of the bed looks similar. The price is only 5,000 yuan. In the furniture city, the similarity of the brand's different furniture looks more than 90%, and the price varies widely.
On the Xinfeng Highway in Fengcheng Town, Fengxian District, dozens of furniture processing factories are located along the street. In a store full of semi-finished wooden dining chairs, the boss is very enthusiastic about the customers who ask. When the reporter walked into the store, he saw a thick sample book on the desk, and each booklet was printed by a different brand of furniture manufacturer. The boss told the customer to check it out at random. "As long as you are fancy, we can do it."
Ms. Li, who has nearly 20 years of experience in the furniture industry, told the reporter: “A lot of furniture companies did not pay much attention to intellectual property protection when they first developed, which led to a lot of counterfeiting. The manufacturers of imitation furniture are usually small workshops of several people. The production conditions are relatively poor. In order to save costs, many brand furniture factories now outsource their products to other small factories. Due to the lack of corresponding management mechanisms, counterfeiting and OEM are all possible."
Mr. Li is a designer of a well-known furniture company in China and graduated from Tongji University. He told reporters that when designing a set of furniture, designers have to spend a lot of effort, but the style is updated quickly. Now the furniture industry does not pay attention to the design of furniture. It is not willing to spend this blood to ask the designer, and eventually it will cause direct plagiarism. The vicious circle of other people’s works has made the furniture industry’s imitation style more and more popular.
According to people in the legal profession, at present, there are many laws and regulations for the protection of furniture product designs in China, mainly including patent law, copyright law, trademark law, and other relevant laws and regulations. Among them, the patent law protects the design or utility model of furniture products; the copyright law protects the original furniture shape design and furniture product design; the trademark law protects the trademark rights of furniture products.
Shanghai lawyer Fu Minyan analyzed that according to the Copyright Law, such furniture used in life belongs to practical works of art, that is, works of art with practical uses. Some enterprises copy the design works of others according to the needs of customers, which actually directly infringes the copyrights of others. If the right holder applies for a design for the functional art work, then the counterfeiters are also suspected of infringing on the patent rights of others. Even if the right holder does not apply for the design of his practical works of art, these practical works of art are still protected by the copyright law, and the owner of the work may require the infringer to bear the responsibility of stopping the loss of the infringement compensation according to the copyright law.
Fu Minyan believes that in China, the registration of works is a voluntary principle. Whoever applies for registration is the name of the person. In terms of effectiveness, the former registrant defaults to the right holder. Of course, because the "threshold" of copyright is relatively low, it is also risky for rights holders to maintain rights only in accordance with registered works in the process of rights protection. If the manufacturer sells the trademark on the basis of counterfeiting the works of art, the plot is more serious. It is suspected of violating the relevant laws and regulations of the Trademark Law and the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. If the situation is serious, criminal liability may also be involved.
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