DESIGN PATENTS FOR COMPUTER ICONS

Kevin E. Flynn of the law firm of Daniels Daniels & Verdonik, P.A., has an informative article in the online magazine LocalTechWire.com about the use of design patents for protecting the ornamental design of computer icons. Why get a design patent on a computer icon, well:

"While it is unlikely that any company will gain a substantial competitive advantage from having a slightly different icon for the delete trash can, a company creating specialized software for such applications as data mining or manipulation of biotech data may create new functions and thus develop new icons to represent those new functions.  These new icons may ultimately become so linked to the new function that the icon represents that it would be a competitive disadvantage to build software that uses some other non-recognized icon."

Thanks for the tip, Kevin, it also reinforces that for all the technology improvements zooming down the development pipeline, sometimes the "old-fashioned" intellectual property schemes have applicability and value.