After 5 and a half years of controversy, the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) has granted protection to the layout of the homepage of Mountain View‘s search engine. Copyright protection arises automatically in the moment of creation of the work of authorship, however, in the U.S. registration is a prerequisite to begin a legal action and this may give a hint on what Google’s new IP legal strategy might be. In fact, some of the most aggressive competitors, Yahoo Search and Microsoft Bing, were inspired by the graphic simplicity of Google flagship product. The protection obtained by Google (No. U.S. D599 372S) is limited to the layout, that is the composition of images e texts. Copyright Law gives the owner an exclusive set of rights upon the sole external expression of its idea. In other words, no one will be allowed to create another homepage with two large buttons, a series of links located under a long research field, however it will be possible, for example, to devote an entire page to the sole purpose of the insertion of keywords to search the web. Italian Law also protects web pages, that are always the result of a certain investment made by a firm. The Italian Copyright Law (L. No. 633/41) define home pages as “multimedia works”, namely those creations that combine in one product works of different kinds (words, images, sounds, etc..), usually delivered through a digital media and a managed by a software.