Don’t Let Them Clone Your UI
Updated: 11 hours ago
Some time ago I met a client in Vienna, in the café at mumok – the Museum of Modern Art in the MuseumsQuartier.
From the outside, mumok is just a dark, minimalist concrete block. Inside, you walk past Warhol’s cans, Lichtenstein’s comics and Oldenburg’s objects – things that began life as packaging, advertising and industrial design, and ended up framed as art. It’s hard to sit there and not think about where the line between “commercial” and “cultural” design really runs.
Opposite me sat a client – a digital product designer who also worked on a new interface for a major automotive brand. First: physical details of the interior. Then: the same design language translated into a 3D digital cockpit, and further into a mobile app that controlled elements of the car.
He showed me a few screens in Figma. Same character: proportion, rhythm, the way information was structured and revealed.
At some point he said:
“Everyone understands you can protect the shape of the headlights or the body line. Can we do something similar with the interface, before it becomes yet another ‘inspiration’ in someone else’s product?”
That is exactly where art and product design meet UI/UX.
In the museum you look at an object that was once just packaging or a chair. In digital products, a screen that today is “just another layout” might, in a few years, be the template for an entire category.
The real question is:
Do you treat that screen as just a Figma file – or as an asset you can own, enforce and monetise?
The law already sees your interface as design
Let’s start with the basics.
Under EU law, a design is the appearance of the whole or a part of a product – its lines, contours, colours, shape, texture, materials or ornamentation.
And “product” explicitly includes graphic symbols and graphical user interfaces, not just physical items.
EUIPO’s guidelines are very clear: screen displays, icons, GUIs and other visible elements of a computer program can be registered as designs, typically in Locarno class 14-04 (“screen displays and icons”).
The recent EU design reform (Regulation (EU) 2024/2822 and Directive 2024/2823) goes even further. The system has been modernised specifically to cover digital, virtual and animated designs, including in-game assets and screen-based interfaces.
In other words:
For the legislator, your dashboard, onboarding flow or HUD is not “just UX”. It is a product appearance that can be registered as a design – in exactly the same family as a chair or lamp.
Most product teams still don’t use this at all.
Why designs matter so much for app creators and startups
From a founder’s or product lead’s perspective, design is often judged by whether users “get the screen” and whether the metrics look good.
From an investor’s perspective, design is also part of your IP portfolio.
A recent joint EPO/EUIPO study on over 119,000 EU firms shows a few things very clearly:
only a small fraction of SMEs own registered designs,
those that do have significantly higher revenue per employee,
and generally outperform similar firms without registered IP.
Correlation is not magic. It simply reflects a pattern:
companies that deliberately build IP portfolios (patents, trade marks, designs) tend to run tighter organisations,
and investors, lenders and buyers read IP structure as evidence that a business takes its intangible assets seriously.
For an app creator, the conclusion is simple:
If your key differentiator lives in UI/UX, a complete lack of design strategy is a very real gap in your IP strategy.
When interfaces hit the courtroom: Apple, Samsung and “slide to unlock”
The most famous moment when a smartphone interface became courtroom material worth hundreds of millions was, of course, Apple v Samsung in the US.
Among other rights, Apple enforced three US design patents covering, in essence:
the rectangular front with rounded corners,
the rim around the screen,
and the grid of colourful icons on a black home screen.
A jury originally awarded Apple USD 399 million in design-patent damages calculated on Samsung’s total profit from certain smartphones, before the US Supreme Court sent the case back down to refine how those profits should be measured.
Different jurisdiction, different statute – but the message was global:
The way a phone’s home screen looks can be protected and enforced as design, not just “style”.
Separately, Apple’s infamous “slide to unlock” European patent (EP 1964022) – covering the gesture and interaction mechanic – was ultimately invalidated in Germany after years of litigation over whether it was inventive enough.
Why does that matter in a column about designs?
Because together they illustrate the full picture:
Patents can protect how an interaction works (gesture, mechanism).
Design rights / design patents protect what the elements look like – icons, layout, shapes.
For most apps and digital products, the differentiator is less about a brand new algorithm and more about the way information and interaction are visually organised.
In that territory, design rights are often your most realistic and powerful IP tool.
From gallery to GUI: when look & feel has a life of its own
Back in mumok, many of the pop-art icons on the walls – cans, posters, logos – started life as pure commercial design in the service of selling things.
Today we look at them as autonomous cultural objects.
Something similar is happening in UX, only faster:
A certain feed layout becomes “how TikTok looks”.
A way of displaying stays, photos and maps becomes “how Airbnb feels”.
A specific map or navigation style becomes “how that one mobility app does it”.
At that point it’s no longer just “a nice layout”. It’s a visual language that users associate with a product or category.
Design law gives you a way to say:
“We introduced this visual language to the market – and we were first.”
And to translate that into real protection against clones.
What exactly can you protect in UI/UX?
Translating the legal regime into Figma and design systems, a few categories come up again and again.
1. Screens that define the product
These are usually:
the main dashboard everyone screenshots for decks,
a distinctive timeline or calendar view,
a unique way of presenting data – a particular mix of map, list and charts.
Simple test: remove the logo and change the colours. If your team still recognises it instantly as “our product”, it is a strong candidate.
2. Sequences and animations
EU design law doesn’t stop at static screens. You can represent animated interfaces as a sequence of key frames, each one a static image, showing characteristic stages of change.
That covers things like:
micro-interactions (how a card moves between states),
animated transitions between steps in a flow,
loading, success and empty states that are part of your brand’s identity.
The animation itself lives as JSON or Lottie in your repo. But the appearance at key stages can live as a registered design.
3. Component systems
In modern products, it’s often the design system, not a single screen, that creates recognisability:
tiles, cards, chips, pills and filters,
the way you combine charts, tables and side panels,
iconography and badges with a very specific visual DNA.
These can be registered as designs for “part of a product” if they create their own recognisable overall impression on the informed user.
4. UX in 3D: cars, XR and virtual cockpits
As more interfaces move into:
digital cockpit clusters in cars,
AR overlays,
XR productivity and creative tools,
heads-up displays and spatial controls,
design law is increasingly applied to virtual, spatial interfaces.
The new EU framework expressly brings virtual and animated designs into the fold. For an automotive brand, that means it’s not only the physical dash shape that can be protected, but also the layout and look of the digital cockpit.
Labels, skins and variants – where designs beat trade marks
Founders in D2C, cosmetics, beverages and lifestyle brands often tell me the same story:
“We have dozens of label variants, limited editions, collabs. Filing a trade mark for every version makes no sense. Are we just exposed?”
This is where designs shine.
The EU system allows multiple design applications: one filing, many designs from the same class, with reduced fees for each extra version.
Instead of:
flooding your portfolio with word/figurative marks for each layout, or
accepting that beautiful limited editions will be cloned on marketplaces,
you can register a family of labels as designs and cover the visual concept.
The same thinking applies in digital:
dark and light mode,
iOS, Android and web variants,
different states of a key component,
can sit next to each other in a single multiple design filing.
Trade marks struggle with too many visual variants (evidence of consistent use becomes hard). Designs are made to handle visual variation – as long as each variant is a “design” in its own right.
Unregistered vs registered: the right you already have – and the one you’ll wish you had
In the EU, every new design you first disclose to the public automatically enjoys Unregistered Community Design (UCD) protection for three years.
That includes UI layouts and screens.
UCD is useful, but limited:
you must prove when and where you disclosed the design,
it protects only against copying (independent creation is a defence),
and after three years it simply disappears.
A Registered Community (soon: EU) Design is different:
initial 5-year term, renewable up to 25 years,
presumption of validity,
listed in a public register that investors, platforms and courts actually consult,
protects against independent creation within its scope.
UCD is a safety net – helpful against obvious clones straight after launch. For a signature interface that you expect to carry your product for years, relying on UCD alone is increasingly hard to justify.
AI, Figma and the age of “accidental twins”
On top of all this sits AI.
Current tools can:
generate entire dashboards from a text prompt,
restyle flows in the spirit of particular apps,
recombine existing patterns at scale.
They are trained on huge amounts of existing interface data. They do not read the design register. They do not know who filed first.
A realistic scenario today:
Your team spends a year refining a distinct workflow for a complex B2B use case.
You ship. Users love it. You do not file any design.
Somewhere else, another team asks an AI tool for “a modern interface for [your exact problem]” and iterates on what comes back.
The result ends up uncomfortably close to your solution – not because anyone set out to copy you, but because the model has converged on the same visual grammar.
If nobody has registered anything, you are left arguing over screenshots and dates.
If the other side has filed designs and you have not, you may find yourself defending your own product against a party that simply moved faster with paperwork.
The whole point of the new EU rules for digital and virtual designs is to give creators of interfaces a clear way to fix priority in time, before mass AI generation blurs the line between “inspiration” and “derivative twin”.
AI will make “good enough” UI cheap and abundant. Design rights are one of the few legal levers that still reward the teams who did the original conceptual work – if they choose to use them.
Design as an asset: startup, board and investor perspective
From a UX designer’s viewpoint, registering designs can feel like bureaucracy. From an investor’s viewpoint, it looks like evidence of disciplined IP management.
The EPO/EUIPO study I mentioned earlier shows that firms with registered IP (including designs) have materially higher revenue per employee and pay higher wages than firms with no IP. Those that own designs in particular enjoy a notable uplift in performance compared to firms with no registered rights.
Again, correlation, not magic. But from a due diligence perspective, it sends a clear signal:
this team understands its intangible assets,
those assets are identified and protected,
and the business is not built solely on “we’ll move faster than copycats”.
For a product company, designs can be:
licensed (e.g. a UI framework licensed to OEMs or white-label partners),
assigned as part of an asset deal if you spin off a product,
included in IP-backed financing or valuation discussions as part of a broader IP portfolio.
If your users mostly interact with screens – not factories, not physical stores – then your interface is where much of your value is actually perceived.
Treating it purely as operating expense, and not as an asset, underestimates that reality.
What a UX / product team can realistically do
None of this means every button needs its own design registration.
In practice, a few habits go a long way:
Identify your “identity screens”. Once in a while, look at your product with the logo removed. Which 3–5 views genuinely define it?
Maintain clean captures. Keep export-ready, logo-neutral versions of those views – no personal data, no clutter.
Think in families. If you’re designing a family of labels, skins or UI variants, ask whether they form a logical set for a multiple design filing.
Time filings with the roadmap. In the EU you effectively have a 12-month grace period from first disclosure for designs, but using that as an excuse to delay everything is risky. Coordinate major redesigns with at least a strategic conversation about protection.
Treat AI output like any other design once you adopt it. If a generated pattern becomes central to your product, treat it as your design – and consider protecting it accordingly.
None of this replaces good UX. It simply ensures that when you do it well – and the market responds – you are not the only one who can legally benefit from it.
Cost and reality: SME Fund and “voucher-based” design strategy
Finally, the practical point: cost.
Through the SME Fund, micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in the EU can receive:
75% reimbursement of official fees for EU, national and regional trade mark and design applications,
50% reimbursement for part of the fees in international design applications via WIPO,
up to a set ceiling per SME.
With sensible planning, a bundle of key designs – a few signature screens, a label family, a digital cockpit layout – often costs less than a single development sprint once the voucher is applied, yet can legally secure years of design work.
Let’s talk about your interface
If you build a product where:
the interface is the main point of contact with users,
your design system is a real competitive advantage,
you are thinking about scaling, entering new markets or raising capital,
it is worth treating design rights not as a curiosity, but as a normal part of strategy – alongside code, trade marks and domains.
At LAWWISE, this is exactly the territory we work in:
identifying what in UI/UX is actually protectable as design,
registering designs for apps, games, automotive UX and XR – in the EU and internationally,
aligning design protection with roadmaps, launches and exit strategies,
helping clients use mechanisms like the SME Fund to reduce costs,
and supporting enforcement when “inspiration” goes a step too far.
If you feel your product has a look and feel that others are starting to borrow, this is a good time to talk.
Because the more of your business lives inside a rectangle on a screen, the more important it becomes to make sure that rectangle – and what you’ve designed inside it – legally belongs to you.
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