IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT—W.D. Wash.: In a battle over Excel-themed deskpads, a resounding victory on the merits for the original creator, (May 21, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

But the desk pad designer takes home lower damages than she sought.

The retailer of a computer desk pad containing a list of commonly used Excel shortcuts was entitled to prevail in a bench trial against a competitor who sold his own Excel-themed product because the two works were “so strikingly similar that the only distinguishing factor would appear to be price,” the federal court for the Western District of Washington has held. But the court, in ruling for the desk pad creator after a bench trial trial, also found that the creator had failed to demonstrate the value of her lost sales and was therefore entitled to recoup only her competitors’s lost profits as damages (Yen v. Yin, No. 2:24-cv-01565-BAT (W.D. Wash. May 20, 2026)).

The lawsuit arises out of a pro se complaint filed by Tan May Yen, a Malaysian artist who sells products online at Amazon under the brands of Pixiecube and Glittery Craft. One of the products she retails is the Excel Sheet Desk Pad, a nonslip pad that covers the area for a laptop and mouse and which contains an extensive list of commonly used shortcut keys for Microsoft Excel. The target of Tan’s lawsuit was Ko Cheuk Yin, a Chinese resident who at the time was offering on Amazon an allegedly similar product entitled the Excel Shortcut Keys Mouse Pad. The lawsuit alleges that Ko, who also represented himself pro se, infringed upon Tan’s rights in her desk pad product and undercut her sales.

After some initial skirmishing in which the court denied summary judgment to the plaintiff Tan and also rejected defendant Ko’s counterclaims, the case proceeded to a bench trial. This opinion followed.

Originality. The court first found that Tan had a valid copyright over the desk pad. Contrary to Ko’s suggestion, the court noted, the evidence showed that Tan created her work independently—“that is, she did not copy it from another work.” Moreover, the court found, while the Excel shortcuts and their descriptors were themselves in the public domain, Tan’s selection and arrangement of those shortcuts was original enough that their combination constituted an original work of authorship. For one thing, the court noted, while there are over 270 Excel shortcuts in existence, Tan selected and included only approximately 150 of those Excel shortcuts. Moreover, although those shortcuts can be organized in at least 25 possible categories, the court noted, Tan arranged them into only eleven distinct categories, including nine categories of shortcuts and two categories of “nonshortcuts.” In addition, the court noted, Tan’s design choices were “primarily aesthetic rather than functional with respect to category selection, special placement, and color-coding.” That was enough, the court concluded, to make her work original.

Copying. The court also easily found that the defendant Ko copied the protected elements of Tan’s work. Indeed, the court noted, the two works were “so substantially similar as to be virtually identical.” Ko created his work, the court found, by instructing ChatGPT to help create a design that employed the exact same category groupings as Tan’s work and a nearly identical number of shortcuts/elements under those categories. Indeed, the court noted, if an online consumer were presented with both designs in response to a query for an Excel shortcut mousepad, “the works are so strikingly similar that the only distinguishing factor would appear to be price.” And while it was true that there were some variations in the color scheme between the two works, the court noted, these variations did not undermine at all the overall similarity between the two products. “If the two works were placed side-by-side with the text replaced entirely by nonsense words,” the court emphasized, “it would take careful scrutiny to determine whether they were different works or whether the color saturation on the monitor simply needed to be adjusted.”

Damages. But while Tan won a resounding victory on the merits, she was less successful on the issue of damages. Tan argued that some portion of these sales reflected a lost sale for her, in the sense that purchases that could have been made for her were “diverted” to Ko—a formulation that would bring her lost profits to as high as $135,000. But she presented “no data or testimony to help determine to what extent [Ko’s] sales traffic may have diverted sales from products other than [her] work,” the court found. To the contrary, the court found, Tan could recover as damages only Ko’s own profits from the infringing sales, which amounted to just under $7,000 in total.

The Case is No. 2:24-cv-01565-BAT.

Judge: Tsuchida, B.

Attorneys: Tan May Yen, pro se. Ko Cheuk Yin, pro se.

Cases: Copyright WashingtonNews