Patent laws were established in 1641 in the United States initially for the Massachusetts Bay colony in regards to manufacturing salt. The Constitution of the United States was ratified in 1789, and that is when Congress first had the right to enforce federal patent laws in the United States. The Federal Patent Law was not actually introduced by the United States Congress until the following year, in 1790. There were laws made for jewelry design patent.
Jewelers were granted two types of patents. It started in 1850 to guard from copying from major competitors. Patents for designs protect the idea behind the design and how it's done while the utility patents guard how the product works or being used.
In the United States, there are more utility patents than design patents. As for the duration of a patent, a utility patent can conceivably continue in effect for seventeen years, while a design patent can only protect a design for seven years. The life of design patents averages 3.5 years. Some companies have not utilized the patent system.
One of the reasons why fine gold jewelry makers didn't use patent system is that there are some designs which are only good for a single season or event. The amount for patents started at $60 up. Some companies didn't waste their time and funds to get patents since it only lasted for a few years and it could easily be dodged.
Utility patents on mechanisms might last more than twenty years and is valuable in protecting the manufacturer for time frame. But you cannot always determine when a piece jewelry was designed and made just by by its patent date. There is a smaller time frame within which a piece of jewelry can be estimated to have been made, since its design patent is shorter than a utility patent. But a manufacturer might continue making the fine gold jewelry without changing the design even after the fine gold jewelry design patent has expired, making it hard to determine the actual time the original patent was obtained on the jewelry design, and thus, hard to determine the age of a specific piece of fine gold jewelry.
Copyright laws were reformed in 1947 to give way for jewelry makers to give copyright to their designs. This meant that fine gold jewelry patents were not needed nearly as often as they had been previously. Trifari Company sued the Charel Jewelry company in 1955 over rights on fine gold jewelry. Trifari Company claimed that Charel Jewelry had stolen some of their designs for costume jewelry, specifically the "bolero" designs. Copyrights are easier to obtain than patents and they cost less; therefore, they are more practical for fine jewelry designers and also they are more valuable. There is a small copyright symbol you can find beside the company's name to show that they have a copyright on the fine gold jewelry.
Even when a fine gold jewelry design patent has been eliminated on a piece of fine gold jewelry, the copyright symbol now gives us interesting insights as to the age and identification of a specimine of fine gold jewelry.
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