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Preliminary examinations of designs

Before you apply to register your design at the PRH (in Finnish or in Swedish), we recommend that you check if there are any obstacles to the registration. Preliminary examinations are useful because there is little you can change about your design once you have submitted the application. We will not refund the application fee if the application is rejected.

If you are interested in design registrations valid in Finland, you can search for them yourself in our Design Database and in the DesignView database, which is maintained by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). Further, you can ask a commercial operator to carry out a comprehensive examination in these databases.

Read more about the requirements for design registration.

Go to our Design Database.Open link in a new tab

Go to DesignView. Open link in a new tab

Ask us to carry out a limited preliminary examination

We carry out preliminary examinations of designs for a fee, but the examinations are restricted to cover only the designs found in or removed from our own register. Our register also comprises pending national applications and international applications where Finland is designated.

Our preliminary examination does not cover Community designs registered by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), which are also valid in Finland.

In the preliminary examination, we search for designs that would be under consideration as obstacles to registration during the actual processing of your application. However, we do not take a stand on whether the designs we have found really are an obstacle to the registration.

Moreover, we do not take a stand on whether those designs would be an obstacle to the manufacturing of your product.

How to order a preliminary examination

To order a preliminary examination, use either our order form or a free-form letter written in Finnish or Swedish. Enclose as good and clear illustrations as possible of the design you want us to examine. We only examine one design per examination.

We aim to carry out the examination within a couple of days after we have received your order. You will receive an invoice for the examination together with the results.

Submit your preliminary examination order by email to registry@prh.fi.

See our examination fees.

Go to the forms.


Printable version Latest update 24.07.2019