The Crafts Report - Leading the Crafts Industry for 35 years

For many people in the crafts industry, patent protection can provide a viable means of protecting the rights to designs and methods of making craft. In many respects, copyright registration is the ideal means of protecting your designs from being “knocked off.” Unfortunately, this is not available for many kinds of craft because copyright protection does not extend to functional features of crafts or the methods of making them. Thus if your crafts are primarily utilitarian objects, or if you want to protect a particular method of making an object, you will most likely have to obtain a patent to protect against copying.