Google Gets Design Patent for Website Graphical User Interface : Patenting a Website, Web Page or Blog Design

Open the "patent gates". You can now patent your website, web page or blog design. Google shows us the way.

The Business and Tax Lawyer Blog posts about a design patent issued to Google for a "Graphical user interface for a display screen of a communications terminal":

I love this one because - let's face it - if Google can patent THAT, then anyone with a uniquely designed website or blog can - theoretically - patent the design of their page(s).

Obviously, most people can as a practical fact not patent their website designs because the cost of patenting is prohibitive -- at least it is for a normal Internet user.

What this means under the first-to-file rule is that anyone with enough money to file a design patent can steal the designs of financially lesser others with impunity -- and this is actually how most everything actually operates.

Hence, the patent laws actually only serve to protect the designs of people or institutions who can afford to register them and who can subsequently afford to hire the lawyers to enforce them.

Justice Scalia, this a direct question to you:

Is that what the Founders originally intended?

We doubt it.

Fame Figurines? SCOTUS : Supreme Court of the United States Bobbleheads at Yale Law School Library

Fame figurines...?

Adam Liptak has a fun piece at the New York Times as the Yale Law Library Adds Bobblehead Dolls to Its Collection. Liptak writes:

"The oldest item in Yale Law School’s rare book collection is a 1,000-year-old fragment of a medieval manuscript bound inside an Italian guidebook for notaries. The newest is a bobblehead doll depicting William H. Rehnquist, 16th chief justice of the United States.

A bobbling Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, archived for study.

Fred R. Shapiro, an associate librarian, explained the latest acquisition: “A hundred years from now, if someone wants to study the bobbleheads, where will they go? There needs to be an archive.”

And so the Lillian Goldman Law Library, which probably has the best collection of rare law books in the world after Harvard and the Library of Congress, is now the official repository of bobbling likenesses of a dozen Supreme Court justices."

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Janis Fusaris.

Q&A Questions and Answers at CNN on the New Health Care Law

CNN has questions and answers on the new health care law at:

Answers to your questions on health care law - CNN.com

"With the passage of the health care reform bill, CNN has been flooded with viewer questions about specifics of the measure and how their lives may be affected. In response, we're providing answers here, based on our reporting research, that address some of the issues you're raising most often."

The Green Bag - Entertaining Legal Scholarship

The Green Bag is a fun legal site self-proclaimed as:

"Our main product is the Green Bag, a quarterly journal devoted to short, readable, useful, and sometimes entertaining legal scholarship. We also operate a press that publishes similar material in a variety of formats."