PMS International Cow Kiddee Case - Kids Travel Case

Product Information

In the Court of Appeal, Kitchin LJ gave judgment and held that the trial judge had erred in two respects. The UK Supreme Court today handed down its first decision on design rights, in the Trunki case ( PMS International (Respondent) v Magmatic (Appellant) [2016] UKSC 12). On Dragon’s Den, where Law tried to launch the product, Peter Jones warned the creator that the design was unprotectable. The SC agreed, emphasising that an appellate court should only interfere with the decision of the trial judge where the trial judged had erred in principle in reaching his decision.

As a result, he agreed with magmatic's submission that that, "when comparing the CRD with the Kiddee Case, the graphical designs on the surface of the Kiddee Case are to be ignored. Merely filing photographs or even CAD representations with unnecessary tonal contrasts depicted, could unintentionally do just that. It is therefore often advisable to file an application covering a number of separate designs to particularly protect or stress the most important features of a design.For example, if the design related to a telephone, the designer is restricted in that the telephone would probably have to have a speaker and a microphone which are an appropriate distance away from one another (ear to mouth).

In contrast, a photo specifies not only the shape, but the surface structure and the material as well, thereby narrowing the scope of protection accordingly” - [2003] EIPR 383, 385. It is not designated as appellate court in the Community Designs (Designation of Community Design Courts) Regulations 2005.The decision represents the final step in a three-year dispute against PMS International as to whether their “Kiddee case” infringed Magmatic’s design rights in the Trunki case. Magmatic registered its designs for Trunki in 2003, while PMS came up with Kiddee in 2013 as a model for the discount market. It did so on the basis that the overall impression of the CRD was indeed of a horned animal, and that the Kiddee Cases had different overall impressions. Given that the Court of Appeal was right to hold that Arnold J misdirected himself in the respects discussed above, I consider that they were, to put it at its lowest, entitled to hold that the judge materially misdirected himself, and that the Court of Appeal should reconsider the question of infringement for itself. The registration is based on a set of images of the Trunki that are shaded greyscale CAD drawings showing a strap, the wheels, and strips of the Trunki in a darker shade than the main body.

It was widely accepted that Magmatic's Trunki product was a highly innovative product, which had met with significant critical and commercial success, with numerous awards for its design.It recognised that the CRD, which was filed in 2003, shared design elements with an earlier prototype exhibited by Magmatic in 1998 [see Fig 1].