The Need for Protecting Industrial Designs

Industrial design is one of the intellectual property categories, which is created by an individual using his mind ‘the intellect”. Industrial design plays an important part in the marketability of products. This ornamental or aesthetic feature of products could differentiate one product from another, both having similar function. Everything produced by man involves an element of design whether resulting from natural evolution or conscious focused activity. Design plays a crucial role in directing and influencing the consumers’ decisions whether to buy the product or not. As in other categories of intellectual property protection, industrial design protection system has become increasingly important in the recent years. This system of protection is aimed at rewarding the industry and designers for their efforts for developing new designs. It protects others from “free riding” on the designs, which they have not laboured for. It therefore encourages and stimulates the development of new challenging products and accelerates technology processes and development of market by granting the industry and the designers the possibility to exploit their designs and recoup the large sums of money used to develop the new designs. In Tanzania, the industrial design protection is in the infancy stage as the industrial design engineering itself is. This paper highlights the importance of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) system particularly the industrial design protection so as to create awareness among the industrial engineers on how they could manage their industrial designs at the market place.