Intellectual Property

Season 5, Episode 29. The Look of the Law: Courts Confront Digital Design Rights

Swipe once and everything changes: not just your screen, but the law that decides who owns the look and feel of our digital world. We dig into how design law—built for chairs, lamps, and sneakers—now grapples with GUIs, animations, and metaverse wearables, and why that shift is reshaping how creators protect their work. From the basics of industrial design rights to the thorny ordinary observer test, we explain how novelty, individual character, and visibility play out when beauty lives in motion, frames per second, and immersive spaces.

We walk through pivotal cases across the United States, China, and India, showing where courts drew hard lines on virtual depictions and where they reimagined who “makes” a product when software renders the interface in users’ hands. Then we explore major reforms in the EU, Japan, Brazil, Canada, and beyond, where lawmakers explicitly recognize non-physical products, GUIs, icons, typefaces, animations, and spatial AR/VR arrangements. If you design apps, skins, or 3D experiences, this is the practical roadmap you need to understand registration hurdles, frame-based filings for animated designs, and emerging standards for comparing interfaces under real-world use.

We don’t stop at doctrine. Expect clear takeaways on building a layered IP strategy—combining design registrations with trademarks and copyright—plus guidance on liability in digital ecosystems where developers create, platforms distribute, and millions of users display. We also tackle metaverse questions: when does copying a virtual jacket cross into infringement, and how should creators think about identity, status, and interoperability across platforms? By the end, you’ll see why the line between tangible and digital design is fading—and how that gives creators confidence to innovate boldly while staying protected.

If this conversation sparks ideas, share it with a designer or founder in your life, subscribe for future deep dives, and leave a quick review to help more creators find the show.

Check out “Protection for the Inventive Mind” – available now on Amazon in print and Kindle formats.

Granit Zela: The Job Where You Argue With Every Sentence – Intangiblia™

A great translation can feel effortless, which is exactly why so many people underestimate what it takes. We sit down with Granit Zela, an Albanian poet, writer, university lecturer, and award-winning literary translator, to get honest about the craft behind “bringing a book into another language” and the real intellectual property questions hiding inside every sentence.Granit takes us back to an isolated childhood in northeastern Albania, where discovering his father’s small library became a turning point. From Jules Verne to 1001 Nights, he explains how reading created passageways out of loneliness and toward authorship, and why that early relationship with words still shapes how he writes and translates today.From there, we zoom out to the larger literary ecosystem: Forum 26, cultural exchange, and what smaller language communities need to remain vibrant in an era of global platforms and dominant languages. We also get practical and specific about translator rights and publishing norms: clear contracts, proper attribution, transparency, and fair remuneration, grounded in one powerful idea that should guide copyright law and copyright reform alike: the literary translator is the author of the translation.We close with the stakes for sustainability and the future, including digital publishing and AI training on books. If technology changes everything, how do we keep consent, control, and fair pay from disappearing? Subscribe to Intangibilia, share this conversation with your network, and leave a review with your take on what “fair” should mean for authors and translators.Send us Fan MailCheck out "Protection for the Inventive Mind" – available now on Amazon in print and Kindle formats.The views and opinions expressed (by the host and guest(s)) in this podcast are strictly their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the entities with which they may be affiliated. This podcast should in no way be construed as promoting or criticizing any particular government policy, institutional position, private interest or commercial entity. Any content provided is for informational and educational purposes only.
  1. Granit Zela: The Job Where You Argue With Every Sentence
  2. Margrét Tryggvadóttir: How Author Protects Stories In The Age Of Streaming And AI
  3. Helen Epega: Opera, Synesthesia, and the Invention of Access
  4. John Degen: Celebrating Authors, Protecting Creativity
  5. Cécile Deniard: The Human Voice Inside Every Translation

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