A New Look at Design Law

Design is the currency of modern consumer culture and increasingly the subject of intellectual property claims. Apple, the world's biggest company, owes its value largely to design. Notably, where courts once rebuffed Apple's claim to own a popular graphical user interface, today design-related claims lead to billion dollar judgments in Apple's favor. Global litigation between Apple and Samsung over the design of smartphones and tablets has been a watershed development, bringing to light the enormous importance of "look and feel" as both a driver of market value and a subject of intellectual property protection. Today, design - which includes everything from shape, color, and packaging to user interface, consumer experience, and brand aura - is attracting unprecedented attention. Indeed, the Supreme Court will soon decide two cases concerning the intricacies of design protection, one involving design patent damages and the other copyright in cheerleading uniforms.

But the law of design is confused and confusing. It is splintered among various doctrines in copyright, trademark, and patent law. Indeed, while nearly every area of IP law protects aspects of design, the law has taken a siloed approach, with separate disciplines developing ad hoc rules and exceptions. To make matters worse, different disciplines within IP use similar terms and concepts - functionality, consumer confusion - but apply them in wholly different, even contradictory ways. In the Apple v. Samsung litigation, for example, the Federal Circuit found Apple's trade dress not protectable because it is functional in numerous ways. But then the court found the very same designs protectable under design patent law, which only protects non-functional elements, because design patent doctrine defines functionality differently. This paradoxical result should give pause. Although Congress and the courts may appear to have carefully calibrated protection within each separate doctrinal area, they may not have adequately considered the simultaneous application of other types of protection. Without an overarching understanding of and approach to design protection, the cumulative effect of overlapping exclusive rights is likely to lead to over protection. Scholarship, too, has focused on design protection in distinct areas of law.

In a new paper called "The Law of Look and Feel," forthcoming in volume 90 of the Southern California Law Review in 2017, Professor Peter Lee and I seek to provide the first comprehensive assessment of the regulation of consumers' aesthetic experiences in copyright, trademark, and patent law-what we call "the law of look and feel." We canvas the diverse ways that parties have utilized (and stretched) intellectual property law to protect design in a broad range of products and services, from Pac- Man to Louboutin shoes to the "feel of the '70s" captured in Marvin Gaye's music, from the décor of Mexican restaurants to Apple's technologies of "pinch to zoom," "bounce-back" and "slide to unlock." In so doing, we identify existing doctrines and principles that inform a normatively desirable "law of look and feel" that provides graduated protection for design. In particular, we reveal that most areas of IP law have developed limiting principles that usefully cabin protection of "look and feel" in response to evolving standardization, consumer expectations, and context. This is occurring largely without forethought, cobbled together as parties seek to expand design protection, on the one hand, and articulate limitations and exceptions, on the other. We distinguish this implicit, normatively desirable "law of look and feel" from the manner in which some courts have expressly used the term "look and feel" to justify expansive intellectual property protection of design. Going further, we argue that the new enclosure movement of design, if not comprehensively reformed and grounded in theory, can in fact erode innovation, competition, and culture itself.

We define "look and feel" broadly. To begin, we adopt a definition that accords with how design theorists conceptualize design writ large, which is more capacious than how courts have used the term "look and feel" in judicial opinions. "Look and feel," as we understand it, both harkens back to the longstanding philosophical study of "aesthetics" as well as includes the contemporary conception of design in the emergent liberal art of "design thinking." In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel referred to aesthetics as "the science of sensation, of feeling."8 Today, commerce has come to appreciate the profound importance of aesthetics for market success. "Aesthetics," Virginia Postrel writes, "is why you buy something." As with Apple's iPhone, look and feel blends beauty and utility as well as integrates form and function. At the level of artifact, look and feel includes elements such as shape, color, style, layout, packaging, and overall visual appearance. At a more conceptual level, it encompasses intangible qualities such as modes of interaction, aesthetic experience, brand aura, and zeitgeist.

Adapting familiar principles to a novel context, we argue that exclusive rights in look and feel that are not sufficiently attentive to standardization, consumer expectations, and context may undermine innovation and cultural cohesion. In a variety of ways, intellectual property law is skeptical of strict exclusive rights over standards, whether they are expressive, linguistic, or technological. Copyright does not allow exclusive rights in stock and necessary expressions, trademark does not extend to generic words embodying linguistic conventions, and patent law mitigates exclusive rights on technological platforms engendering significant social reliance. In similar fashion, we develop a conception of look and feel as zeitgeist - an aesthetic or cultural standard that objectively expresses the spirit of an age. Extending principles of intellectual property law, we argue that when particular forms of look and feel become our lexicon and central to our shared meaning and understanding of a certain time and place, they should come to belong to the culture at large. As we show, doctrines from copyright (scènes à faire and merger) and trademark (distinctiveness, genericide, functionality) already recognize this dynamic nature of design as zeitgeist and relax exclusive rights accordingly. Our comprehensive view of the law of look and feel reveals areas of design law, notably design patents, that fail to incorporate this dynamic view of design.

While offering prescriptions for several branches of IP and applications to the design cases pending before the Supreme Court, we argue in particular for bold changes to design patent law, from its subject matter to its standard for infringement and method for assessing remedies. We seek to bring balance to this jejune area of law by incorporating and tailoring limitations from other more mature fields of intellectual property.