New and Not Against Public Order or Morality: The Threshold for Industrial Design Registration in Nigeria

The threshold for the grant of industrial design registration and protection in Nigeria is novelety and conformity to public order or morality. This is the provision of the Patents and Designs Act, Cap, 344, LFN 1990 which is the regulating statute in respect of designs in Nigeria. With an intellectual property regime that presents the nature of industrial design without a two-dimensional form intended as a model or pattern to be multiplied by an industrial process, Nigeria neglects to consider the kind of uses to which artistic works, protected under copyright law, could be put. It also neglects to acknowledge that while works protected under copyright do not need registration and so could exist without an intention to be used as industrial design, they nonetheless could create a brainwave in a designer to make her adopt, adapt and place the artistic work on a product. This neglect continues to effectively remove the benefit owners of prior art base cout get from adaptation. This paper demands a review of the design statute in Nigeria in order to accomodate dual or multiple protection for inellectual property that have the potential of cutting across fine lines imposed by and accepted as a consequence of teh country's level of development,