Beyond the Tangibility Trap: Analysing the Shift from Physical Articles to Virtual Design Protection for GUIs and Metaverse Icons in Light of NEC Corporation (2026)

Introduction: The Evolution of User Interfaces from Functional Code to Aesthetic Asset Historically, the legal and technological views of User Interfaces (UIs) were created by a purely functional paradigm. In the early days of computing, the interface was simply a utilitarian medium; several command-line prompts were used to connect the human mind to the machine. However, the fundamental shift towards Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) has changed how we think about UIs. Today, a GUI does not...