This chapter details what a better understanding of the creative process should mean for copyright law. Instead of continuing to avoid any rigorous analysis of creativity, courts should investigate authorial motivation and solicit expertise to help diagnose the presence of the required “creative spark.” These changes would bolster copyright’s role in incentivizing the production of creative works while avoiding awards of copyright to unoriginal artworks. The chapter also explains how to recalibrate design patent law in light of what we understand about audience perception of design. The trier of fact should examine whether a design choice makes the design easier or harder for audiences to process. Design choices to be simpler, more prototypical, or more congruous are already likely sufficiently rewarded by consumer choices in the marketplace and should be presumed to lack the originality needed for design patent protection. Through a series of visual examples from actual design patent cases, the chapter explains how, by analyzing the effect of a design choice on visual processing fluency, courts can stop treating all design differences the same.

Design patents protect the way a product looks whereas utility patents protect the way a product is used. The law suggests a great disparity between the artistic creation relevant to design patents and the scientific creation relevant to utility patents. The design process is believed to be so personal and subjective that judges refuse to consider any part of a design more important than another. This stands in sharp contrast to the law’s assumptions about scientific invention, which permits objective and focused evaluation of the invention and its prior art. This art/science double standard does not jibe with evidence that the same neural phenomena are at work in all kinds of creative tasks. For scientists as well as designers, both sides of the brain must be engaged in the same process: coming up with an idea, then building on that idea so that it is useful. To earn design patent protection, a claimed design must be “nonobvious” to “the ordinary designer.” To the extent judges refuse to rigorously compare claimed designs against earlier works to determine nonobviousness, they are straying from the way designers actually generate innovative design.