Fig. 4

Characterization of UK registered designs filed since January 1, 2023 by 15 firms. a Firms could be classified into two groups: those that started filing UK designs before January 1, 2023 (“legitimate”, light blue) and those that started after January 1, 2023 (“suspicious”, salmon). b designs filed by legitimate firms never listed more than two parties as applicants, whereas designs filed by suspicious firms tended to list between 4 and 10. c product indications of designs filed by suspicious firms tended to be much longer than those filed by legitimate firms. d although the median grant time for both suspicious and legitimate firms was 11 days, legitimate firms were far more likely to wait an extended period between filing and acceptance. ** indicates \(p < 0.01\) by two-sided Mann-Whitney U test. e network in which nodes are scaled by the number of designs filed by each firm (between 69 and 1,343) and edges are scaled by the number of designs filed by each firm that share the exact same product indication as those filed by another firm (between 1 and 37). Suspicious firms tended to file designs with the same, long product indication far more often than legitimate firms with their relatively short product indications