Protecting your intellectual property

Ronald Knol, designer of furniture and owner of RKNL, discovered early 2019 that one of his designs for a table (the dinner table One displayed on the picture) was basically copied by a large competitor who offered it for sale at a much lower price. Such copies often are of an inferior quality which can be detrimental to the designer’s good name and reputation. It can obviously also lead to loss of revenue and profits. Therefore, Ronald decided to take action against the infringing party and hired VBLA to send out a cease and desist letter. The basis for a claim against the infringer could both be design right and copyright, depending on the particular circumstances of the case. In this case, a cease and desist letter and a few e-mails back and forth solved the issue and made the infringer decide to withdraw the table from its collection.

Ronald writes about this:

“Yet again a new table in the collection of a major furniture outlet looked very much alike our own dinner table One. Since the manufacturer operates on the same market as we do, I decided to hire Arjen to take action against it. Due to Arjen’s thorough, pragmatic and consistent approach, the brand decided to withdraw the table from its collection. Next time I’ll certainly use Arjen’s services again.”