Developments in recent decades have led to a proliferation of different IPRs and a blurring of the boundaries between them. An object can benefit from the protection of several different IPRs at the same time. This is usually referred to as overlapping rights. This provides increased opportunities for the object holder to protect himself against imitations, while at the same time the competitive conditions on the market may be negatively affected. A central question is how to balance the right holder's interest in protection against the consideration of free competition. Designs can typically be protected by several different intellectual property rights: design rights, copyright and trademark rights. One of the objectives of this project is to study the interface between trademark law and design law for the protection of designs in order to identify similarities and differences and to see to what extent they overlap. Trademark law was the first area of intellectual property law to be harmonized in the EU, through the Trademark Directive and the Community Trademark Regulation. More recently, design law has been similarly harmonized through a Design Directive and a Regulation on Community Designs. The provisions and concepts of both the Regulation and the Directive leave considerable room for interpretation. The research project will examine how these concepts and provisions have been interpreted nationally and under EU law, primarily through a study of case law.