Indiana Law Journal Volume 88 Issue 3 Article 1 Summer 2013 The Origins of American Design Patent Protection Jason John Du Mont Indiana University Maurer School of Law,
[email protected] Mark D. Janis Indiana University Maurer School of Law,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj Part of the Intellectual Property Law Commons Recommended Citation Du Mont, Jason John and Janis, Mark D. (2013) "The Origins of American Design Patent Protection," Indiana Law Journal: Vol. 88 : Iss. 3 , Article 1. Available at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj/vol88/iss3/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law School Journals at Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Indiana Law Journal by an authorized editor of Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Origins of American Design Patent Protection JASON J. DU MONT MARK D. JANIS* Many firms invest heavily in the way their products look, and they rely on a handful of intellectual property regimes to stop rivals from producing look-alikes. Two of these regimes—copyright and trademark—have been closely scrutinized in intellectual property scholarship. A third, the design patent, remains little understood except among specialists. In particular, there has been virtually no analysis of the design patent system’s core assumption: that the rules governing patents for inventions should be incorporated en masse for designs. One reason why the design patent system has remained largely unexplored in the literature is that scholars have never explained how and why the system came to exist.