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. There were laws made for jewelry design patent.

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. Some companies have not utilized the patent system.

Fine gold jewelry is one of those product designs that fine gold jewelry makers did not feel needed patenting, since gold pieces are often made for specific events or for one single season and don’t require the expense of a seven-year patent. 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.

Copyright laws were reformed in 1947 to give way for jewelry makers to give copyright to their designs. 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. As compared to patents copyrights is said to be more proficient and valuable since it could gain faster approval last longer and cost less. Fine gold jewelry, if it’s copyrighted, will always display the copyright symbol beside the name of the manufacturing company.

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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