The company Coolado must stop selling their reclining furniture LayTube within 48 hours. This follows from a ruling by the District Court of The Hague in summary proceedings brought by the company Fatboy. Fatboy holds a European design right for a sitting/lying furniture (air mattress) sold under the name Lamzac. The preliminary relief judge ruled that Coolado infringed Fatboy's design right with the LayTube.
© Coolado
Coolado's LayTube.
The dispute
Companies or individuals who have designed a new shape for a product and want to protect it can register the shape as a Union design. The holder of a Union design can (among other things) prohibit others from offering for sale a product with a similar design. Fatboy has such a Union design right for the design of the Lamzac.
Coolado has also designed an inflatable lounger, the LayTube. Coolado sells the LayTube through its own website and online webshops. According to Fatboy, the LayTube is too similar to the Lamzac for Coolado to infringe Fatboy's design right. Fatboy therefore claimed an injunction against the sale of the LayTube under penalty of a fine.
Coolado disagrees and says that the LayTube is substantially different from the Lamzac. Coolado says the LayTube is an improved version of the Lamzac. According to Coolado, the Lamzac loses air quickly in practice, making it suitable for outdoor use but not for indoor use. The LayTube looks more like an inflatable canoe-shaped lounger than the 'smoked sausage' shape of the Lamzac. Moreover, according to Coolado, the LayTube is designed for therapeutic use and the 'double tube shape' that both the LayTube and the Lamzac have is ideally suited for that therapeutic use, according to Coolado.
© Fatboy
The Lamzac by Fatboy.
Judgment in preliminary relief proceedings
Because in design law any infringing product must be compared with the registered design, it is not important whether the Lamzac may be technically improvable. This is because design right protects the external appearance of a product and not precisely the technical function.
The interim relief judge also ruled that even if the double tube shape of both the Lamzac and the LayTube would have therapeutic benefits, Coolado had not sufficiently substantiated why it could not design alternative shapes. The designer could have chosen from many shapes, such as rectangular, rounded or oval. Coolado's design did not have to have a shape like that of the Lamzac.
The Lamzac's characteristic sewn-up 'smoked sausage' shape is also clearly recognisable in the LayTube. Moreover, the LayTube has a buckle on one side, which can be closed by the user to keep the piece of furniture under tension or attached to something. In its buckled form, the LayTube looks even more like Fatboy's Union model.
The court in preliminary relief proceedings ruled in these proceedings that the LayTube has the same general impression as Fatboy's Union model. By doing so, Coolado infringes Fatboy's design rights. Coolado must stop selling the LayTube within 48 hours under penalty of a fine up to a maximum of 100,000 euros.
More information:
Fatboy
www.fatboy.com
Coolado
www.coolado.com
Company given 24 hours to halt sale
