An interesting story making the internet-ery rounds yesterday: Google has patented the design of their search results page. Not the thing that makes the results get found, no. Rather, yeah, the actual look of when they pop up. It's a little confusing, being as neither of us is a patent lawyer, but the basic idea of it, and this seemed kind of obvious to us, was "Don't steal Google's layouts." But hey, if you're that big, it probably doesn't hurt to have some extra protection on your side.

But the patent procured by Google isn't actually a software patent, intellectual-property attorneys explained. It's a design patent, which means it covers only the visual look of an invention, as opposed to a "utility" patent, which covers the functions an invention performs.

"In fact, this is fairly narrow protection only for the ornamental look of Google's result pages," said Daniel Tysver, a Minnesota-based patent lawyer who runs the resource site Bitlaw, which focuses on intellectual-property law and the Internet.

..."It's one of those 'you know it when you see it' standards that's very hard to articulate," Mann said in a telephone interview.