What Actually Kills an EU Design: Prior Art by Disclosure Type
Crocs fell to a Wayback capture; Axon to a marketplace listing. Across the whole corpus, 56.5% of invalidations cite a web disclosure — and Amazon leads them all, with 620.
The live doctrinal question in EU design invalidity is about disclosure. The General Court's Crocsdecision (T-228/25) turned on a prior clog proven by a 2003 Internet Archive capture; the EUIPO's Axon v Shen Zhen Min Dundecision (February 2026) accepted marketplace and partner-channel listings as prior art; and a run of commentary — Dreyfus on the Wayback Machine, EUIPO's own “hyperlinks and screenshots fall short” note — debates when online evidence is well enough dated to count. All of it treats web disclosure case by case. Step back to the whole corpus and a structural fact emerges that the case notes miss: web disclosures are not an exotic evidence type — they are the dominant one.
A majority of invalidations rest on the open web
Of the first-instance decisions that invalidated a design, 56.5% cite at least one web disclosure — a marketplace listing, a social-media post, an archived page — as prior art. That is more than any category of registered right. None of it is visible in the EUIPO design register, which means a clearance search confined to registered rights misses the single most common way designs actually fall.
Practitioners already know a Wayback capture can kill a design. The finding here is how often it does — and that one marketplace leads them all.
Amazon is the #1 source — and Pinterest is not on the board
Among web disclosures, the concentration is stark. Amazon is cited in 620 invalidations — more than the next several sources combined, ahead of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (less a platform than the tool practitioners use to date a listing that has since changed), YouTube and Facebook. The image-heavy platform practitioners often assume is the culprit — Pinterest — does not make the top tier at all. The reason Amazon dominates is mundane and instructive: it is where copied consumer products get listed, with dated photographs from multiple angles, which is exactly the form prior art needs to take. The full ranked source table — and each type's kill rate — lives in the prior-art view.
What it means in practice
Two consequences. For clearance, a search that stops at registered rights is structurally incomplete — the dominant invalidating evidence lives on marketplaces and in archives. For a challenge, the marketplaces are the first place to find a dated disclosure, and the Wayback Machine is how you fix its date — subject to the evidential discipline the recent cases insist on: the capture must be complete, clearly dated and properly sourced, or it falls short.
The full breakdown — every prior-art type, how often it is cited, and its invalidation (“kill”) rate — is in the prior-art intelligence view; the wider base rates are in the invalidity success-rate report.