The Unparalleled Italian Vespa

The Court of Turin has ruled: the shape of the Vespa is a creative and artistic work of industrial design and, as such, cannot be copied. This was the judges’ reasoning in delivering a landmark 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, as they were reproductions of Piaggio’s historic model, the Vespa. On that occasion, the Guardia di Finanza had determined that the models on display infringed upon the Piaggio Group’s exclusive rights, consisting of the three-dimensional trademark registered to protect the Vespa’s distinctive shape. One of the companies involved in the seizure, the Chinese firm Taizhou Zhongneng, subsequently sued Piaggio in the Turin Court seeking to invalidate the Vespa’s distinctive trademark and, consequently, to establish the compliance of the line of Chinese motorcycles presented at EICMA, the “Ves.” The Italian group, however, initially responded by asserting its design rights over a specific model, the 2005 Vespa LX, and subsequently over all models produced from 1948 to the present. The Court granted the requests of Piaggio’s attorneys and ruled not only that the Chinese company may not market the Ves scooters, but also that all stylistic variations of the Vespa are protected under Article 2 of the Copyright Act. This raises some concerns, however, because while the illegality of a line of scooters identical to Piaggio’s—and moreover bearing the diminutive “Vespa”—was a foregone conclusion, it is more complicated to define the scope of the protection granted by the ruling to the Piaggio model. In fact, stating that all the different versions of the Vespa are intellectual property protected by copyright effectively prohibits the sale of any scooter, since the shape of the Vespa and that of a scooter are one and the same. We will therefore have to wait and see how strictly this ruling is enforced to understand its true scope.