International Law

Google Patents Home Page

By Karl-Friedrich Lenz

The American Patent Office has granted a “Design Patent” to Google for their home page. The main element of that design is nothing, leaving most of the page blank.

I have no problem with design protection. I have also no problem with seeing it extended to important home pages.

However, the concept of leaving most of the page blank should not be owned by any one company. Google can only claim protection for what they added to the empty page, not for the empty page as such.

It will be interesting to see if that design patent is enforced against Yahoo, which also leaves most of the search page blank.

Full post as published by Lenz Blog on September 04, 2009 (boomark / email).