The fourth amendment to the Patent Law, effective 1 June 2021, extended design patent protection to partial designs of a product. Before then only the overall appearance of a product could be protected.
Three consequences matter in practice.
1. Protection can follow the design effort. Where a product's overall form is dictated by function but the real design work sits in one area — the camera module on a phone, the front grille on a car, the control panel on an appliance — that part can now be protected on its own, so a competitor cannot design around it simply by changing the rest of the product.
2. Graphical user interface (GUI) designs have a clearer route. It is no longer necessary to enumerate every end product on which the interface might appear.
3. The application documents work differently. A partial design must use solid and broken lines to separate the portion claimed from the portion not claimed, and the product name must identify the part being claimed. Faulty representation — solid and broken lines used incorrectly, or a product name that does not meet the naming requirements — is the most common defect in these applications.
