Can you show us some references to this law?
In Europe you can apply for design patents. Afaik doing so costs a four digit sum in EUR plus the patent lawyer that writes the legalese for you.
However, to get such a patent the design must clearly be novel. Really, really novel. My uncle happens to be a patent lawyer a.d. who fought a lot of cases about product design for a big telco in the European patents court in his time. Knowing a few of his cases, I strongly doubt dcurtis design would be eligible for a design patent in Europe.
The blog itself (it's functionality) would fail an attempt to patented for similar reasons.
Apart from that, yes there is copyright everywhere but where this starts in cases like the one at hand is a gray area at best.
I'm not a lawyer, but it appears to be covered in the Berne Convention [1] as "works of applied art". The copied design we saw this morning was probably "substantially similar" [2] to the original. Apparently designs are copyrighted in the US as well, in contrast to what I thought [3].
I guess my point was that all that doesn't matter if the original design doesn't exhibit enough originality (I used the term 'novel').
To give an example: if I have an A4 page with left aligned text, that looks very similar to any other A4 page with left aligned text that happens to use the same font size and line height.
In the case at hand, the design wasn't even dcurtis', he presumably took it from http://drawar.com/
Or maybe not?
With a design so simple, similarity by coincidence can't be ruled out.
I wouldn't be surprised if another dozen websites existed that exhibited a /very/ similar design.
However, to get such a patent the design must clearly be novel. Really, really novel. My uncle happens to be a patent lawyer a.d. who fought a lot of cases about product design for a big telco in the European patents court in his time. Knowing a few of his cases, I strongly doubt dcurtis design would be eligible for a design patent in Europe.
The blog itself (it's functionality) would fail an attempt to patented for similar reasons. Apart from that, yes there is copyright everywhere but where this starts in cases like the one at hand is a gray area at best.