German design law: change and continuity

German design law, established in 1876, was modified significantly when the EU’s 1998 Designs Directive was implemented in Germany in 2004. While, for instance, the standard for testing a design’s validity under the original German design law was its “novelty”, compared with a specific piece of prior art, and its “individuality”, considering the entire body of existing designs, the German Design Act of 2004 required a design to be “new” and to have “individual character” when compared with all other prior designs one to one; this latter test including the “degree of freedom of the designer in developing the design”, which requires consideration of all the existing designs in that area side by side.