Back in 1641, patent laws originated to protect salt manufacturers in the Massachusetts Bay colony in the United States. Congress was given the power to enforce federal patent laws once the Constitution of the United States was effective in 1789. The Federal Patent Law was not actually introduced by the United States Congress until the following year, in 1790. Jewelry design patent laws began to be enforced.

Actually, fine gold jewelry designers now had the option to choose between two different types of patents. By 1850, competition within the jewelry industry had become steep enough that manufacturers and designers of fine gold jewelry started investigating how they could get patents on their designs. 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.

There is a separate numbering system for the utility patents and design patents and wherein the former has a higher count. 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. In some cases, manufacturers opt not to acquire a patent on a certain product.

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. To acquire a patent, a company must pay at least $60. 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 design mechanisms can apply to over two decades which gives the individual a time frame of when the mechanism was introduced. This, however, will not tell when the jewelry was made. 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.

In 1947, jewelry makers began copyrighting their designs instead of patenting them, when copyright laws were enacted. Since this was introduced, the need for patents decreases. In 1955 the Trifari Company brought a suit against the Charel Jewelry company. 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.