Below are noted the key references from presentations and discussion, key themes and questions presented for discussion, and outlines of the three panelists’ talks. Additional notes on the discussion will be added before the end of Friday 17 February.

Event announcement and speaker biographies

See event information on the Own It site.

Panelists

Jonathan Sellors, Finers Stephens Innocent
Tracy Currer, interaction design consultant
Rachel Jones, Instrata
Chair: Nico Macdonald, writer and design industry consultant

Nikki Barton, cimex, was not able to present due to illness.

Key references from presentations and discussion

Examples

Many designers, design studios and design-related researchers have commercialised intellectual property in screen-based design, as products and companies. Some of these examples were mentioned at the event:

• Inxight: search and visualisation tools company spun out of Xerox PARC (now PARC).
• Gemstar: licenses its interactive program guide TV Guide On Screen. Licensees include Hitachi, JVC, LG (Zenith), Matsushita (Panasonic), Mitsubishi, Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Thomson (makers of the RCA, GE and Scenium brands), TiVo and Toshiba.
• Spotfire: and interactive visual analytics company based on visualisation work done by Christopher Ahlberg at the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab. (See Company History.)
• Thinkmap: founded in 1997 as Plumb Design Inc., originally interactive services and software firm. ThinkMap markets software that uses visualisation to facilitate communication, learning, and discovery. Its best known use of its toolset is the Visual Thesaurus.
• Surfacemap: founded by Rodney Edwards to market and develop browser-based user interface software for content-rich products. Early versions of the software toolkit were developed by Edwards Churcher Ltd.
• Basecamp: a project collaboration tool based on innovative interface and interaction design development, created by 37signals, founded as a Web design studio and usability testing service.

Funding

Some programmes allow for realising greater value from screen-based and other forms of design work:

• BBC Innovation Labs: currently running in Yorkshire, London and the North-West. A second series of Labs may start later this year in certain UK regions.
• NESTA Creative Capital Fund: the CCF will make matched equity investments of up to £75,000 in promising early stage companies and offer these nascent businesses mentoring and support.

Organisations

Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure: and independent european organisation to oppose patents being applied to software in Europe [forwarded by Ian Newton of Net Europa Internet]

Resources

• Design Council About Design cell on Intellectual property
• Design Council About Design cell on Interaction design by Nico Macdonald

Key themes

• Why should designers be thinking about intellectual property (IP) and screen-based design?
• What is the extent of pixel-based design work: the Web, interfaces for mobile and entertainment devices, software graphical user interfaces (GUIs), icons, environments and public displays? Information architectures, online brands and logos, user interfaces and interaction designs in general? Design processes and methods?
• What kinds of IP protection are available, and how should you decide which to use?
• How do you find out if an idea is protectable (and whether your own designs infringe other people’s designs)?
• What is involved in applying for protection, defending protected designs, and in exploiting IP?
• What are the key pitfalls to avoid and rules to follow?
• How can we think more broadly about exploiting IP in screen-based design?

Questions presented for discussion

• What are the most protectable aspects of screen-based designs?
• Is it practical to track breaches of your IP rights?
• Or to defend against their breach?
• What new markets for IP exploitation could be opened up, eg: to smaller organisations?
• Why do engineers appear to be better than designers at capitalising on their ideas?
• Can designers be more innovative in their design work and create greater, and more protectable, value?
• If it is difficult or impractical to protect design concepts, do designers need to think laterally and, for instance, start businesses around their design concepts?
• Where do designers unknowingly infringe (protected) design ideas?

Protecting interfaces - what can you do?

By Jonathan Sellors

A brief re-cap of IP law

• Patent
• Copyright
• Design right
• Trade marks
• Confidential information

Who owns the design

• Client
• Presumptions are confusing
• Write it down
• As a designer, keep what you need

1: Screen logo or icon

• Copyright
• Trade mark

2: Idea for a web site or other innovation

• Best of luck
• Comparison with Pop Idol, Who Wants to be a Millionaire

3: Software

• Language
• Software itself
• Logistics behind programme
• Look and feel
• Decompiling
• Interoperability

4: Web site

• Web pages
• Look and feel
• Page design

5: Application or Screen design

• What it is, software or artwork
• Copyright, possibly design protection

Practical steps

• Write it down
• Don’t presume
• Act promptly
• Be pragmatic

Presentation from Rachel Jones

By Rachel Jones

A patent has to be novel, that is, it cannot have been done before and cannot be obvious.

In my experience, UI is difficult to patent for three reasons:

1. Some of the best UI design is the simplest, and it can appear too obvious
2. It can be difficult to reduce UI design down to specifics
3. Describing a visual in words is hard to do

The crux for me is finding the patentable

Examples of successful patents

• Placeholder – a novel data object
• Scan to placeholder – a novel process
• Web navigation mechanisms – a novel algorithm
• Radical visualisations – the fish-eye lens

Examples of unsuccessful patents

• Interaction that combines hardware and software controls
• Visualisation of scheduling
• Visualisation of a site map

The process of patenting in large corporations involves

• Writing a 1-page description
• An ongoing dialogue with lawyers which potentially reveals the unexpected
• A process that takes years
• Patents are filed in the US
• Writing patents are incentivised by bonus payments

Realising value

• The problem is defending patents, so as an SME, don’t waste the money
• Should we patent anyway, because it can stifle creativity?

Presentation from Tracy Currer

By Tracy Currer

1. Introduction

2. Observations

• Designers are blinkered... lawyers are open-minded and dispassionate
• IP may reside in many aspects of a design solution and may not be context specific
• Designing with learned user behaviours could mean you're treading on someone else's IP
• I speak "geek"... but "legal" is a difficult language to master
• The process of applying for a patent is not straight forward from identification to documentation and submission

3. Two case studies (Spyfish + Psion Wavefinder)

• Spyfish h2eye (2001): a sub-aquatic video camera manipulated remotely by a wireless controller.
• Wavefinder Psion (2000): a digital radio antenna for multimedia PCs.

4. Spyfish (2 patents)

• Graphical User Interface of ROV (european patent): the experience through the behaviour on-screen elements
• Graphical User Interface of ROV (US patent): method for the creation and playback of recorded industry music and audio

5. Spyfish demo - explanation of the patents

6. Wavefinder Psion (2 patents)

• Media player receiving entertainment content from several sources (worldwide patent): representation of content and source type clustered on a 2-d map
• Interacting with digital text data sent from a digital radio service (worldwide patent): enabling a user to quickly initiate an e-commerce transaction through the data text

7. Wavefinder demo - explanation of the patents

8. Summary

• Where do you stand with regard to your IP and your clients
• Be prepare to argue a business case for delivering the appropriate design solution
• Think outside the solution!
• Seek advice - you get one chance to get it right
• Think about how you will exploit your IP