The Unparalleled Italian Vespa

The Court of Turin has ruled: the Vespa's shape is a work of creative and artistic industrial design and, as such, cannot be copied. This is the judge's ruling, handing down a historic ruling that, for the first time, grants exclusive marketing rights in Italy to the timeless Vespa. It all began in 2013 at the EICMA motorcycle show in Milan, where the Guardia di Finanza seized eleven scooters on display, belonging to seven different companies, because they were reproductions of the historic Piaggio model, the Vespa. At that time, the Guardia di Finanza found that the models on display violated the Piaggio Group's exclusive right to the three-dimensional trademark registered to protect the Vespa's distinctive shape. A company involved in the seizure, Chinese Taizhou Zhongneng, subsequently sued Piaggio before the Court of Turin to cancel the Vespa's distinctive trademark and, therefore, to have the "Ves" line of Chinese motorcycles presented at EICMA declared compliant. The Italian group initially responded by asserting design rights on a specific model, the 2005 Vespa LX, and then on all lines produced from 1948 to the present. The Court upheld the requests of Piaggio's lawyers and ruled not only that the Chinese company cannot market Vespa scooters, but also that all stylistic variations of the Vespa are protected by Article 2 of the copyright law. This, however, raises some concerns because, although the illegality of a scooter line identical to that of Piaggio and even titled with the diminutive "Vespa" was obvious, it appears more complicated to define the scope of the protection granted by the ruling to the Piaggio model. Indeed, stating that all the different versions of the Vespa are intellectual property protected by copyright means prohibiting the marketing of any scooter, since the shape of the Vespa and that of the scooter are the same thing. We will therefore have to wait and see how strictly this ruling is implemented to understand its true scope.