LEGAL PROTECTION OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN AS AN OBJECT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The article examines the legal protection of industrial design as an object of intellectual property based on the current legislation and norms of the European Union. The object of the study is social relations, which formed regarding the emergence, implementation and protection of exclusive rights to objects of industrial design. The identification of the legal nature of objects of industrial design was facilitated by the use of a system of methods: dialectical, systemic-structural, formal-logical, functional, interpretation, and formal-legal. The absence of the term «industrial design» in the current legislation of Ukraine indicated. It noted that a work of design understood as a set of ideas and images that have been expressed in pictorial or volumetric-spatial forms because of the author's independent creative work in designing the appearance of products. Objects of industrial design, expressed in products, can receive additional legal protection as a three-dimensional trademark, provided that such a sign acquires distinctiveness, which is currently determined according to the following criteria: the connection of the elements of the form of the claimed three-dimensional sign with the ability perform certain utilitarian functions (functionality); the traditional nature of the form of the product; availability of alternative forms of identical goods. Here under utilitarian functionality it proposed to understand the conditionality of the form of the volume designation by the performance of an exclusively technical function, which affects the cost and quality of the product and allows the right holder to obtain significant advantages among competitors. It noted that the approaches to the ratio of legal regimes of protection of objects of industrial design divided into cumulative, cumulative, demarcation and partially-demarcation. It is indicated that it is advisable to enshrine the term «industrial design» in the legislation of Ukraine, which corresponds to the classification of objects of intellectual property adopted in the countries of the European Union.