AI and Design Law: The UK’s Bold Move to Future-Proof Creativity in the Age of Automation
Oct 09, 2025
The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has launched a major Design Consultation, one that could reshape how creativity, technology, and design are protected in the 21st century. It’s not just another legal update. It’s a pivotal moment for the design and legal professions to define where human creativity ends, and where AI innovation begins.
AI-Generated Design: Who Owns Creativity When Machines Create?
At the heart of the consultation lies one of the most pressing questions of our time:
Should AI-generated designs, those created without any human authorship, qualify for legal protection?
Currently, UK law offers protection for computer-generated designs, but this provision has been rarely tested in practice. Now, the government’s preferred position is to remove protection for fully AI-generated works, unless there is strong evidence that doing so would stifle investment in innovation.
This potential shift aligns the UK with the US and EU, where only designs with identifiable human authorship are protected. It’s a defining move that forces legal professionals, designers, and technologists to rethink the meaning of authorship and originality in the AI era.
Modernising for Digital and AI-Driven Innovation
Beyond the AI debate, the consultation proposes the most significant reform of UK design law in decades, aiming to strengthen protection across a £100 billion sector that supports nearly two million jobs.
Key highlights include:
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Fighting design theft: Empowering UKIPO to reject unoriginal or bad-faith applications.
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Simplifying rights: Streamlining overlapping protections and allowing publication deferrals for up to 18 months.
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Improving access to justice: Introducing a small claims track for design disputes — a boost for SMEs and independent creators.
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Modernising formats: Accepting CAD files and video clips for design applications, ensuring protection keeps pace with digital and interactive innovation.
Together, these reforms represent a significant step toward design law that reflects how designers actually work today, digitally, iteratively, and increasingly in collaboration with AI tools.
Why It Matters for the Legal Profession
For lawyers, in-house counsel, and legal designers, this is more than a policy update, it’s a new frontier for practice. The intersection of AI, design, and intellectual property will redefine advisory roles, client expectations, and even how legal documents are crafted and visualized.
As legal professionals move toward more usable, human-centered legal systems, this consultation signals a parallel evolution: Law itself becoming more designed, adaptive, intuitive, and responsive to the realities of technological change.
The Future of Design Protection Is Being Written Now
By inviting input from designers, technologists, and lawyers alike, the UKIPO is acknowledging what the future of law must be: Collaborative and multidisciplinary.
The consultation closes on 27 November 2025, and participation from the Legal Design community will be crucial. Because in the age of AI, protecting creativity means reimagining the very structures of law that support it.
More information about the Consultation on changes to the UK designs framework here.
