51In support of EUIPO’s line of argument, the Commission submits that, as is apparent, inter alia, from the Guidelines for the interpretation of the Paris Convention drawn up by the World Industrial Property Organization (WIPO) – which, whilst not legally binding, may nonetheless be relied upon before the Courts of the European Union for the purposes of interpreting that convention – the contracting parties to that convention deliberately decided not to include patents in the exception provided for in Article 4(E) thereof, on account of the lack of possibility of any overlap between patents and designs. That institution submits that Article 41(1) of Regulation No 6/2002 is fully in line with that approach, inasmuch as it recognises a certain permeability between, on the one hand, utility models alone and, on the other hand, designs, as a result of the fact that, as the Court acknowledged in its judgment of 8 March 2018, DOCERAM (C‑395/16, EU:C:2018:172, paragraphs 24 to 29), those are both capable of protecting the technical function of a product.
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