An Interesting Patent

Some time back I came across this interesting patent from Google. The title of the Patent is as follows : Graphical User Interface for a Display Screen of a Communications terminal. This is a patent for the Google home page www.google.com . Yes, its a patent claiming the ornamental design of the Google homepage user interface. Some sources in the web indicate that this an design patent and will last for 14 years. Google also holds copyright and trademark ownership over the same user interface. I'm not completely sure why Google would want to patent this UI, where holding a copyright or trademark ownership makes more sense. One of the reasons that I came across was if you don't register for copyright within 3 months of the first publication of your work, then you have very limited scope of suing copyright infringement. Since Google was not taking copyrights seriously when the homepage was first published, I guess it took this route to protect the homepage. You can read the patent http://goo.gl/AeLmg. Below is the image used in the patent.