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Patent laws were established in 1641 in the United States initially for the Massachusetts Bay colony in regards to manufacturing salt. 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. 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. There is also a difference in the length of time between the design and the utility patent as the former will only last upto 7 years with the average of 3 1/2 while utility patent could work for 17 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 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. In 1947, jewelry makers began copyrighting their designs instead of patenting them, when copyright laws were enacted. 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. They demanded that Charel Jewelry company stole their 'bolero' costume jewelry 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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