U.S. Patent No. D844,022 S (‘022) issued on March 26, 2019, for “Computing Device Display Screen with Graphical User Interface.” It was issued to inventor Shalin Amin, of San Francisco, California. The applicant/assignee is Uber, Inc. of San Francisco, California, a ride share/ride hailing company. This patent is a design patent under 35 U.S.C. §171, which protects the ornamental features of an article of manufacture. The features cover a novel design for a GUI.
Figure 2 illustrates the ornamental features of the GUI display:
The Cooperative Patent Classification is G06F (electric digital data processing, namely, interaction techniques based on graphical user interfaces, namely, lists of selectable items, e.g., menus, and for the control of specific functions or operations, e.g., selecting or manipulating an object or an image, setting a parameter value or selecting a range, scrolling or panning, and drag-and-drop).
Design patents are slowly becoming an important aspect of a tech company’s patent portfolio. Like its rival, Uber recently announced plans to file for an initial public offering (IPO), making it the first of the major rideshare companies to go public. As of the end of 2018, Uber, Inc., had 497 issued patents, and 262 publised patent applications in its patent portfolio, which is far more than Lyft’s patent portfolio. Early estimates indicate Uber’s market valuation could be as high as $120 billion, far eclipsing Lyft’s valuation of $23 billion. While patent portfolio size and market valuation are not always consistently parallel data points, in the case of the rideshare companies, it is instructive. Please contact Yonaxis for more information on design patents, or patents in general, if you have any questions.