Patents available for website GUIs?

Hi, You can file patent for this. Just file provisional patent as soon as possible and after that you can mention that the website GUI is patent protected . The overall process of getting patent granted will take 3-4 year but it will provide you good protection against competitors.
You can also go for copyright of software codes for this.

Ashutosh

A patent gives you the right to exclude your competitors from practicing your invention. Whether to pursue it depends a great deal on how easy it would be for a competitor to circumvent your specific invention. A web interface would be patentable most likely as a design patent (specific look of your interface) or a process (steps methods of interacting through your interface). It would be difficult to define such an interface as only a "structure" (product patent), without incorporating method or process steps (I've filed over 60 software patents as a firmware engineer, so have some experience in filing interface applications). The issue you face is in defending your patent if you succeed. You need to at least threaten infringement of a competitor (and be able to provide their interface uses at least one of the elements you claim) but more likely need to be able to back that up with a time consuming costly infringement suit, or get them to pay you a licensing fee (which is better option, assuming you have a valuable interface).
Filing a provisional application gives you 12 months to either file a true utility application (a design patent cannot take advantage of a provisional application, if you chose a design patent for the structure of your interface). It only provides protection if you both file and receive a grant for the non-provisional utility application that follows (the costly, 3-4 years). So your decision needs to be based first on how easy it is to get around your invention (low value patent), how hard it is to discover infringement by another (hard = lower value), and how much a competitor would just as soon pay you a reasonable license fee to use your invention, or parts of it (using any part is infringement). If you have a really good invention that someone else would pay to use, then a patent has better value to pursue. In all cases, you should think much more in terms of licensing value to a competitor over exclusion. Exclusion means infringement suits -- where patents are concerned, the carrot (license) is almost always the greater value than the stick (exclusion) unless you have very deep pockets to go after what may be a large number of infringers (the web world having lots of competitors). Hope that helps!

If you decide patenting is the right way for you, design patents can explicitly cover a GUI. It takes some time until a design patent is actually granted but not nearly as long as the more common utility patent. If your invention is in the functionality of the GUI that's best protected by a utility patent. I agree with Ashutosh's rec for the provisional patent route to get something filed quickly - the filing date is often very important. Copyright will protect your software coding, but IMO gives less robust protection.