Milan Court Rules Coin's Tablecloth Infringes Gio Ponti Copyright

The Milan Court issued a preliminary injunction on July 13, 2020, prohibiting Coin from producing and selling a tablecloth called Twill, which reproduced Gio Ponti's design Eclissi without authorization from his heirs. The court ruled that Eclissi, first published on the cover of Domus magazine in 1957, qualifies as a figurative artwork under copyright law, not an industrial design. Coin's defense argued the design lacked creativity and should be treated as industrial design requiring both creative character and artistic value. The court found that the tablecloth copied the distinctive graphic elements of Eclissi—paired semicircles in varied colors and serial repetition—and that color differences did not create independent representational autonomy. The injunction halts further production and commercialization of the tablecloth in all dimensional and chromatic variants, while the question of moral and economic damages is deferred to a full trial.