Moral rights and industrial design

The chapter examines moral rights arising from the creation of industrial design works. The author observes how, in the European Union, the overlap between the registered design law and the copyright law, which also applies to industrial designs, raises problems of harmonisation between the rules of one discipline and those of the other, while at the same time allowing a considerable extension of the moral rights available to the author. However, the attribution to the author of an industrial design of all the moral rights recognised by copyright law raises non-trivial problems of balancing interests against the need to protect the reasonable expectations of the authors' successors in title.