Furthermore with the 2024 reform, the (revised) definitions of “design” and “product” have been broadened, in order to cover movement, transition and animation of features determining the appearance of a product: the new Article 2 of the Design Directive states that “‘design’ means the appearance of the whole or a part of a product resulting from the features, in particular the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture and/or materials, of the product itself and/or of its decoration, including the movement, transition or any other sort of animation of those features” and that “‘product’ means any industrial or handicraft item other than a computer program, regardless of whether it is embodied in a physical object or materialises in a non-physical form, including: (a) packaging, sets of articles, spatial arrangements of items intended to form an interior or exterior environment, and parts intended to be assembled into a complex product; (b) graphic works or symbols, logos, surface patterns, typographic typefaces, and graphical user interfaces”. Protection is therefore no longer limited to the design of physical objects, but can also cover designs that appear only on the screen or on virtual platforms. Likewise, the right holder’s exclusivity is also expressly extended by Article 16 to activities consisting of “creating, downloading, copying and sharing or distributing to others any medium or software which records the design for the purpose of enabling a product referred to in point (a) to be made”, a rule which is intended to apply also to 3D printing of copies of design-protected products. Instead, when the means to shape food products or to realize their lighting are peculiar and suitable to solve a technical problem in a non-obvious way, or at least to provide a particular effectiveness or convenience of application or use to already existing products, it is certainly possible to resort to patent protection, for invention in the first case (innovative solutions not within the reach of the expert in the field), with a duration of 20 years; for utility model in the second (particularly effective forms), with a duration of 10 years, of course in countries (and Italy is among them6) that also admit this form of protection, which is not mandatory under the TRIPs Agreement. In particular, this second hypothesis seems in fact feasible, in the face of lighting devices “designed” specifically to highlight the peculiarities of gastronomic products, without altering their organoleptic features and visual pleasantness, and indeed trying to enhance the latter. So far, therefore, there is nothing different from any other form of innovation: identical protection rules, simply applied to the peculiar problems that the shape and lighting of food products may present: at most, particular 6 A list of the countries that protect utility models, even if not all in the same way, may be found at the web page https://www.wipo.int/en/web/patents/topics/utility_models. 268 CESARE GALLI
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