This page covers the intellectual-property posture of the DomiDo platform and the universal block system that grounds it. The platform's core invention is a self-complementary tetrahedral relief interlocking block system, and the intellectual-property strategy is built outward from that invention through several layers: patents on the geometry itself, trade marks on the brand and the marks under which the geometry is sold, registered and unregistered design rights on the visual form of the block, trade secrets covering the manufacturing processes and the software internals that the patent does not disclose, copyright on the platform's documentation and source code, and a defined approach to the authorship and licensing of Artificial Intelligence-generated content that flows through the design pipeline. The sections that follow describe each layer in turn, together with the prior-art picture against which the patent strategy is drafted, the freedom-to-operate posture that confirms the platform does not infringe granted third-party patents, the enforcement approach the company takes against clear infringement, and the audit log that records every filing, every prosecution event, and every take-down notice issued or received. Throughout, the intellectual-property regime runs in parallel with the not-a-toy product-safety positioning described on the Product safety page, because the marketing language that supports each regime has to be consistent with the other.
The core invention is a self-complementary tetrahedral relief interlocking block system suitable for construction-scale and modular building applications. Each block takes the form of a parallelepiped — a cube or a rectangular brick — whose faces carry a defined interlocking surface relief built from tetrahedral protrusions and complementary tetrahedral recesses. The defining property of the system is that identical mating faces can interlock with each other directly: there is no male-or-female face distinction, there are no special block types for corners or ends, and there is no mandatory top or bottom orientation that the worker has to recognise before placing a block. The invention solves several recurring problems in modular building-block systems at once. The mating surfaces self-position and align during assembly, reducing the need for jigs, fixtures, and skilled labour. Orientation-independent use eliminates the requirement to define a privileged top or bottom or any special faces, which removes the special corner or end block types that conventional systems carry. Constrained-space assembly becomes possible, because a closing block can be placed at corner nodes where conventional relief patterns and insertion directions would prevent it. Local reinforcement and adaptability allow local strengthening, overlaps such as bonding or staggering, and the addition of connector or rebar elements without forcing a fixed block orientation. The same blocks can serve as formwork to cast new blocks that inherit the same mating-surface relief, which is an unusual property among modular systems. The geometry also has dual-use potential as a toy or educational construction set at smaller scales using the same geometric interfaces, although the product positioning at launch is deliberately not-a-toy and that positioning is enforced through every marketing surface.
The relief is rule-defined rather than decorative, which is the crux of the patent strategy. It is built from tetrahedral protrusions projecting outward from the face plane and complementary tetrahedral recesses projecting inward, where each tetrahedral element comprises triangular planar side faces meeting at an apex and the recess is the geometric inverse of the protrusion. The critical property is self-complementarity: the same relief pattern, applied to two separate block faces and brought together, interlocks, with every protrusion on one face seating into a corresponding recess on the other and vice versa. That property is what eliminates the male-or-female face distinction found in most interlocking block systems and what removes the corresponding need for orientation rules.
Each mating surface sits on a square base plane that is partitioned into four equal quadrants by partition lines drawn from the centre to the midpoints of each side. Within each quadrant, a paired protrusion and complementary recess — a dyad — is defined. The footprint of each tetrahedral element in the plane of the mating surface is a right triangle with the two legs oriented toward the centre and the hypotenuse along the outer boundary of the quadrant. The per-quadrant dyad is replicated across the full face by ninety-degree rotational symmetry about an axis normal to the base plane through the centre, producing a four-part circular array with four protrusions and four recesses and four-fold (C4) rotational symmetry. The result is a geometry in which any two identical mating surfaces can engage; every protrusion on one face aligns with a corresponding recess on the other, and the blocks seat into a deterministic final position. A worker does not need to identify which face is "top" or "bottom" before placing a block, because the mating surface self-positions the block on engagement.
The protrusions and recesses have a defined taper angle measured relative to the base plane, with a full range of one to fifty degrees, a preferred range of twenty to fifty degrees, a more preferred range of forty to fifty degrees, and a most-preferred value of fifty degrees. The taper determines engagement depth, draft compatibility, structural performance, and manufacturing tolerance. The geometry is compatible with standard injection moulding, casting, and three-dimensional printing without undercut features, because all tetrahedral facets are planar, the tapered geometry shares a common withdrawal direction normal to the mating plane, and no hooks, snap features, or elastic-deformation engagements are required. That property is a significant advantage over prior-art interlocking systems that require undercuts and is one of the features the patent claims surface explicitly.
The patent application is at the pre-filing stage. The block geometry is not publicly revealed before filing, and any disclosure to a supplier, contributor, or counterparty runs through a Non-Disclosure Agreement so that no inadvertent public disclosure exhausts the novelty before the priority date. The patent strategy targets the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office and the European Patent Office as the primary filing offices, with international extension through the Patent Cooperation Treaty preserving the option of filing in the United States, China, and other major manufacturing and consumer markets within the priority period. Independent apparatus claims target the self-complementary relief defined by the rule-based geometry; dependent claims cover the cube and rectangular-parallelepiped variants, the taper-angle sub-ranges, the materials, the manufacturing methods, and the use of assembled blocks as formwork to cast new blocks. Method claims cover the assembly process — the sequence, the constrained-space placement, and the orientation-independent placement procedure. The drafting attention focuses on avoiding clarity problems with "preferably" and "more preferably" language inside independent claims under European and United Kingdom practice; the taper-angle sub-ranges sit in dependent claims rather than inside the independent claim, and the specification explicitly states that the illustrated facet orientations avoid re-entrant undercuts relative to the mould withdrawal direction so that the manufacturing-advantage argument is on the record during prosecution.
The prior-art search covers granted patents, published applications, academic literature, and commercial product disclosures. The closest art falls into three categories, none of which anticipates the claimed combination. Generic convexity-and-concavity interlocking blocks lack the rule-defined tetrahedral facet architecture. Square-pyramid grid arrays on block faces lack both the right-triangle base orientation and the per-quadrant dyad rule. Hook-or-snap engagement systems require undercuts that are incompatible with standard moulding. The differentiators preserved by the rule-defined tetrahedral architecture, the right-triangle base orientation, and the four-fold rotational symmetry sit at the core of the independent claims, which is the reason the prior-art picture is recorded explicitly rather than hidden inside the prosecution file.
Beyond the functional patent, registered designs and unregistered design rights protect the visual form of the block. The United Kingdom Registered Design Right, administered by the Intellectual Property Office, and the European Union Community Design, administered by the European Union Intellectual Property Office, cover the visual appearance of the block faces, the block proportions, and any distinctive trade dress that emerges around the product; both registrations run as part of the patent-filing programme so that the visual form and the functional invention move through their respective offices on a coordinated timeline. Unregistered design rights cover the same form for shorter periods without registration cost and provide a fallback for any visual feature that the registered design does not capture.
The trade-mark layer registers DomiDo, the platform logo, and the key sub-brands — the visual identity, the design-system mark, and the gallery mark — as trade marks in the United Kingdom through the Intellectual Property Office and in the European Union through the Intellectual Property Office. The registrations span the relevant Nice Classes: primarily Class 28 (toys and construction sets) where the dual-use considerations apply, Class 9 (downloadable software), Class 19 (non-metallic building materials), Class 35 (online retail services), Class 42 (software-as-a-service), and Class 45 (online marketplace services). A trade-mark search runs before each registration to confirm freedom to use the mark in the relevant class, and domain-name registrations cover the primary domains in the United Kingdom and the European Union together with defensive variants that protect against typosquatting. Marketing copy and packaging language are reviewed before launch to make sure that toy-style language does not appear on the product, because the same words that would support a Class 28 trade-mark filing for a toy would weaken the not-a-toy positioning that drives the product-safety regime; the two regimes are read together rather than separately.
Trade secrets cover everything the platform does that would not be disclosed by the patent. The protected material includes the platform's internal algorithms (the twelve-stage pipeline solver heuristics, the Bill of Materials optimiser, and the pricing engine internals), the supplier and manufacturer relationships, the Artificial Intelligence prompt engineering and the quality controls that surround it, the Quality-Assurance and defect-detection procedures, and the design-review moderation rules. Protection runs through access control on internal systems, written Non-Disclosure Agreements with every contributor and supplier, the operational security controls documented in the security requirements, and restricted dissemination of confidential documents — so the practical protection layer matches what the Trade Secrets (Enforcement, etc.) Regulations 2018 (transposing European Union Directive 2016/943) expects of a controller relying on the regime. Trade-secret protection runs in parallel with patent protection rather than as a substitute: the patent application covers the geometric invention, and trade secrets cover everything that the published patent does not disclose, so a leak of either layer does not expose the other.
Copyright protects original works automatically. The platform's source code, design assets (icons, illustrations, three-dimensional assets), marketing copy, the assembly instructions, the documentation, and the wiki content are all subject to copyright owned by Avvyland Limited. The ownership flows through the engagement structure: employee contributions transfer through the standard employment-contract assignment, contractor contributions transfer through the assignment clauses in the engagement contracts, and equity-only contributors assign or licence intellectual property in their contributions through their engagement agreement. User-generated content — designer-published designs in the gallery, comments, and reviews — is licensed to the platform under the terms of service, and the licence grants the platform the right to display, distribute, and use the content as needed to operate the gallery, generate previews, render the three-dimensional viewer, and process orders incorporating the design.
The designer marketplace operates on a default contracting position in which the designer assigns intellectual property in a design to Avvyland Limited on first publication and is paid a substantial sales-derived royalty on each kit sold incorporating that design, set in accordance with the published marketplace royalty terms. The agreement template includes representations and warranties from the designer that the design is original, does not infringe third-party intellectual property, and that the designer has the right to assign it. The platform's moderation runs image and content checks against known marks and protected works so that infringement evidence surfaces on the platform's side before a take-down is required from outside, and the audit trail behind those checks supports any later defence the platform has to mount.
The platform processes Artificial Intelligence prompts and reference images through external providers to generate the eight projection views and the three-dimensional model that feeds into the pipeline, and the intellectual-property treatment of that processing is layered to cover both the inputs and the outputs. The user owns the prompt and any reference images they provide, and the platform processes both under the terms of service for the purpose of generating the design; the terms make clear that the user grants the platform the licence necessary to process the prompt, generate the projections and the three-dimensional model, run the pipeline, and produce the design. Authorship and ownership of the resulting design is governed by the laws of the user's jurisdiction. In the United Kingdom, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 recognises computer-generated works under section 9(3) — the author is taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken — and the user is identified as that person under the terms of service. Other jurisdictions may decline to recognise copyright in computer-generated works, as the United States Copyright Office currently requires human authorship, so the platform's terms are drafted neutrally and the design is treated as the user's content for licensing and gallery-publishing purposes regardless of whether the relevant jurisdiction grants copyright on those facts. The platform's Artificial Intelligence provider contracts are reviewed to confirm that input and output data is not retained or used to train models beyond the immediate generation task, and that any retention is short-lived and used only for service quality.
A freedom-to-operate analysis confirms that the block geometry, the platform's software, and the manufacturing methods do not infringe granted third-party patents or pending applications. The analysis covers the geometry against the prior-art set described above, the pipeline software against publicly published modular-building software patents, and the manufacturing methods against the standard injection-moulding patent landscape. A watchlist of pending applications and granted patents in the modular-building and three-dimensional-design space is monitored quarterly, and any new grant or publication that could affect the platform's freedom to operate triggers a re-analysis rather than being deferred to the next scheduled review.
Enforcement is proportionate to the commercial impact of the infringement rather than symbolic. Take-down notices through marketplace platforms — Amazon, eBay, and Etsy — are the first response to clear-copy counterfeit blocks, and cease-and-desist letters precede any litigation. The platform's intellectual-property counsel coordinates with United Kingdom Border Force and with United States Customs and Border Protection on detained counterfeit consignments, and industry coordination runs through the Anti-Counterfeiting Group and the international Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition. Enforcement budgets are kept proportionate to the commercial impact of each case: symbolic litigation against minor infringers is avoided, while substantial commercial copying triggers formal action.
The intellectual-property audit log records every patent-application filing and prosecution event, every trade-mark filing, every design-right filing, every Non-Disclosure Agreement signed, every designer-marketplace assignment received, every take-down notice issued or received, and every freedom-to-operate analysis update. The log is retained alongside the filings themselves so that a single retrieval window covers both the documents and the lifecycle events that touched them.