Hello, European Union (EU) 21st century software-driven-everything activists. EU copyright protection included an interface’s look and feel (video games, robotic surgery controllers, smartphones, global positioning system (GPS) navigators, and so on), because interfaces were forms of expression, while EU industrial property (patent) protection was/but-was-not for new, useful, and not obvious aspects of interface functionality, because those have innovations. Now, the European Court of Justice (December 22, 2010, C-393/09) has decided that interfaces are not a form of expression within the scope of copyright protection. Confused? Actual software code lines (performing the interface) are still protected, just like literary works, but the interfaces enabled are not copyright protected because that’s functional (and thus subject matter for industrial patenting).

Did your genius programmer design interfaces intuitive to average five-year-olds, or did you spend millions on industrial designers and psychophysics/ergonomic experts to compare learning curves and functional efficiencies of various interfaces? Perhaps, because patent protection (especially for software in Europe) was/is a virtual legal impossibility, you relied on copyright protection for your masterwork user interface. Announcement: Tough luck, EU people; it ain’t protected no more! So if your interface design was pure customer magic, then all the “new” look-alike copycat interfaces get that magic for free.

Neurologically speaking, the EU intellectual property organism brain seems lobotomized--no more coordination between the left-brain (creative) copyright side and the right-brain (functional) patent side. Now, to understand this pathological uncreative dysfunctional decision in much greater detail, and to find some viable proactive options, I suggest this paper. Read it and weep.