FASHION LAW IN ITALY
Por Niccolo Ferretti
Fashion law is in Italy (but, I rather say in the entire world) a fairly recent specialization.
Only in 2009 I started to organize some short seminars and master programs regarding this matter, which was almost not known before. From that time it has grown and expanded very fast.
Nowadays, several Universities propose fashion law courses and many fashion law lecturers and programs are held in all the country by numerous entities. Of course, Milan is the capital city of “la moda”.
You cannot live in a city which hosts twice a year la settimana della moda (fashion week), with countless catwalks, events and happenings taking place simultaneously, without being fascinated by this magic “industry”. Because of that Milan is also the best place to practice fashion law, which is strongly linked to, although not exclusively involving, IP rights matters.
The Court of Milan Business Division is particularly well experienced in litigations related to the protection of design and trademarks, which are the core business of the fashion industry.
Shoes, clothing and accessories in general are very often the subject matters of the Courts’ decisions. That is the reasons why Judges and practitioners are more and more devoting their attention, speeches, doctrine articles and studies to this sector.
The Italian Fashion Houses have a turnover of about 78 billion Euro, of which about 51 billion Euro consists of export income.
This may just give an idea of the economic importance of this market for our country. Then it does not surprise the number of judicial battles and litigations amongst the big names and reputed trademark to enforce their IP rights against the unfair competitors.
The impact of this big number of proceedings and judgments in our national case law is relevant.
Our domestic doctrine and jurisprudence have developed and studied in depth legal arrangements common to the European law.
From the definition of well-known trademarks, to the assessment of the shape adding value to the product, from the risk of confusion, to the deceiving trademarks, from the informed user definition, to the three-dimensional trademarks, from the ISP liability, to the selective distribution systems and the exhaustion principle, there is not field of the trademark, design, copyright and unfair competition law, which has not been explored by our experts.
Since fashion law includes everything which belongs to the luxury world, we cannot forget that many other sectors different from the strict sense clothing and apparel industry contribute to the development of the fashion law.
For instance, jewelries perfumes, furniture, luxury vehicles, etc. belong to the fashion industry and therefore to the fashion law.
Under this respect, the new frontier is represented by the very recent decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union regarding the applicability of the copyright protection to works of applied art, such as fashion and design products (C-683/18).
This judgment seems to have lowered the threshold for the protect ability of said products by the means of copyright.
The harmonization of copyright law in the EU is far from being completed, but the Judges of the CJEU have move towards a case law harmonization amongst EU countries keen to protect works of applied art with copyright and other EU countries reluctant to afford such protection.
I am sure we still have a long way to go to improve the protection of IP rights in the fashion law field at a national and European level, but surely we are on the good truck and we can rely on a large group of very passionate fashion lawyers!