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Industrial design is migrating to the virtual world, and the design patent system is migrating with it. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has already granted several thousand design patents on virtual designs, patents that cover the designs of graphical user interfaces for smartphones, tablets, and other products, as well as the designs of icons or other artifacts of various virtual environments. Many more such design patent applications are pending; in fact, US design patent applications for virtual designs represent one of the fastest growing forms of design subject matter at the USPTO. Our project is the first comprehensive analysis of design patent protection for virtual designs. We first take up the question of virtual designs as design patenteligible subject matter, a question that has not yet been tested in the courts. We show that longstanding principles of design patent jurisprudence supply an answer to the …