What is a design patent anyway?
A design patent is primarily a series of drawings that disclose and claim a new, ornamental design of a portion of a product. Here is an example of a series of drawings for a design patent that I prosecuted for one or my sports and entertainment industry clients. You will notice the these drawings have some solid lines and some broken lines. This is a way you can claim only a part of your design and thereby be very specific as to which combination of design features you are protecting as your own innovation. In this case, it does not matter whether a competitor uses a different guitar neck, etc. If the guitar body is substantially the same such that an ordinary purchaser could puchase a guitar having the competitior’s guitar body design thinking that it was my client’s design, the competitor’s guitar body likely infringes this design patent.
