Expired in 2007 for failure to pay the year 11 maintenance fee. Feel free to use this patent in your own products; it's in the public domain!

Just goes to show that sometimes innovation and entrepreneurship don't go hand in hand.

Just search for cat vs laser pointer on Youtube. There's a ready made mint right there.

Public domain is for copyrights, isn't it? Patents are always public. That's their whole point.

A patent is in the public domain until it issues and after it expires. It just means the patent is not yet or no longer in force and therefore the subject matter is not restricted. 'Public domain' has nothing to do with being secret or readable by the public either in copyright or patent; it's a matter of freedom to use or copy.

I mean, is that the actual legal term for expired patents? "Public domain"? I thought it was a term of art for copyright, not for patents.

Yes. Also in patents.

For some reason it reminds me of this http://www.google.com/patents/US20060071122 Full body teleportation system US 20060071122 A1 ABSTRACT A pulsed gravitational wave wormhole generator system that teleports a human being through hyperspace from one location to another. I know, it's an application only, but still))

How is it that the USPTO and can issue a faulty government decision, and yet receive no repercussion? If a building inspector fails in his job and a bridge kills a bunch of people, surely it not just the construction contractors that will be blamed but also the government?

Maybe the patent office would do a better job if overturned patents gave ground for suing the government over granting the patent in the first place.

Do trial judges have to pay fines when their decisions are overturned on appeal?

Maybe they should. MLB has seen significantly better umpiring since linking pay to performance.

You have compared people dying to faulty patents.

What?

if you don't like comparing USPTO with government building inspectors, feel free to compare them to any other government official of choice.

What about environmental protection official who issues a faulty decision and cause a ecosystem to take significant damage? People do not need to die before we want there to be some responsibility in governmental decisions.

Are there any meta-patents out there? "Patent on patenting a patent on patent application", or something?

There's this one: http://www.google.com/patents/US20100332285?dq=US+2010033228...

describing a computerized system for managing IP; its descriptive matter includes sentences like this: "The patent creation component 430 defines the process for enabling the client organization to develop and protect inventions that are new, useful, and non-obvious." and one of the elements in its claim 5 is "a fourth electronic IP creation component for filing and prosecuting patent applications, trademark applications, and copyright applications".

I don't think so, but that's a really challenging thing to find via search engines.

Judges are more familiar with law than they are with other fields. Making software look like statutory material by careful drafting of a patent application may be possible, but I imagine making a legal maneuver look like statutory material for a patent is much harder.

I have often thought about trying to patent the patent troll process.

Yeah, sorry but there is prior art.

But I thought prior art doesn't matter anymore? In 2013 the US patent system changed from first-to-invest to first-to-file.

I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, if you're actually in a situation where it matters you should check with a real lawyer, etc.

This is a common misconception. First-to-file does not mean that prior art doesn't matter. First-to-file means that, if I invent something today, you invent it tomorrow, you try to patent it the next day, and I try to patent it three days from now, nobody gets the patent. In first-to-invent, I would get the patent.

The 2013 law explicitly still gives weight to prior art.

Prior art still invalidates a patent. First to file only comes up when you have to people inventing the same thing at similar times.

You can invent something without it being prior art if you don't publish how to do it, file a patent, or use/sell it in commerce.

So if you are testing a new invention in secret and then the University of Wisconsin files a patent on the same thing, they get the patent. If someone else had already sold the products or described it publicly, nobody could get a patent on it (except for the person who sold it and then only for a year after they sold it).

That is not at all what first-to-file means. Depressingly common misconception though.

That doesn't stop software patents on literally millions of long established practices.

Can we get a patent on prior art itself?

Only if there is no prior art.

So it's prior art all the way down?

Also, does the patent on all prior art cover itself?

IANAL, but I doubt you can patent recursion either.

"A method for defining an computational operation, performed by a computer system or a mechanical equivalent of thereof, in terms of the same computational operation performed by the identical system. Such computational operation is defined in such a way it consists of two separate computational suboperations - one and only one of them is defined completely in terms of the composed computational operation itself."

Sounds like it could fly with USPTO.

(And if it doesn't, you can try and confuse people by patenting Y combinator.)

Halliburton at one point attempted to patent it. http://www.google.com/patents/US20080270152

This patent gets rediscovered every half decade or so for the past two-ish decades. I first saw it when George Goble was all the Internet rage[1].

If I recall correctly, the patent applicant patented this to demonstrate the perceived silliness of the US patent system.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Goble

Apparently a vital part of - http://www.google.com/patents/US8181265

"invisible light" is an oxymoron, unless they are talking about IR or UV. They also call it "bright" in the same paragraph. If it appears bright to the operator of the beam, it cannot be invisible light.

Are you implying that this patent should not have been granted?

I'm suggesting that the USPTO people can't spot glaring errors of logic in a simple introductory paragraph of text that is devoid of complicated technical or legal language.

No wonder they grant applications for obvious programming techniques, like oh ... the use of XOR to draw a sprite on a black-and-white pixel display, such that if it is drawn again at the same location, it is erased, restoring the original background.

You're taking this entirely too seriously. @marvin was very likely joking also.

Kazinator is making a fair point. But yes, I was making a joke ;)

I had to re-read that part. They are talking about an ordinary red or green laser pointer. The beam itself is hardly visible compared to the spot on the wall--unless your air contains a lot of dust or smoke or fog.

To anyone with a grade 5 science education, "visible light" means a frequency between IR and UV.

No beam of any type of light is visible in vacuum; it is superfluous to call it invisible in that sense because there is no contrasting opposite.

Patent office staff should have a decent background in science.

That's all well and good, but is it a useful use of a cat?

IIRC, this novel idea has been filed multiple times (and may have been granted as well) at the USPTO at different times. I believe that this is because the USPTO sometimes leaves it to the interested/affected parties to raise complaints and go through these rather than do the donkey's work of exhaustive prior art search.

I wonder if this actually seemed reasonably novel in 1993. When did laser points get popular in the home market?

Laser pointers date back to the early 80s. I'd wager that the interval between the first laser pointers getting into the hands of consumers and the first laser pointer being used with a cat was approximately 3.7 minutes.

People have done this with small mirrors for a long time.

no, just no.

With this post I wanted to show novelty is important in patents. I actually had a wide field to choose from though, for instance I seriously considered the following patents:

- Patent US3480010 - an anti-snore device that consisted of a "neckband [that] contains a microphone, a transistor amplifier, a high voltage-producing transformer, a supply battery, a relay and a pair of spaced electrodes [which] are in contact with the sleepers skin" [1]

- Patent US20130239604 - Promotion of peace, love and understanding through the global proliferation of snowpeople system method and apparatus [2]

- UK patent GB1047735 - "Arrangements for the transfer of fresh water from one location on the earth's surface to another at a different latitude, for the purpose of irrigation, with pumping energy derived from the effect of the earth's rotation about the polar axis" [3], or in layman's terms it was basically a plan to position giantpeashooters in the Antarctic pointed at Australia's deserts which would fire snowballs to irrigate them

- Patent US6368227 - Method of swinging on a swing. Can't add anything to this really, that's precisely the patent that was granted. [4]

- Patent US6025810 - Hyper-light-speed antenna (probably THE most novel of all the patents granted by the U.S. Patent Office, because it specified a transmission method capable of "sending the signal at a speed faster than light.") [5]

- Patent US6612440 - from the abstract: "A banana protective device for storing and transporting a banana carefully." [6]

---

References:

1. http://www.google.com/patents/US3480010

2. http://www.google.com/patents/US20130239604

3. http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=...

4. http://www.google.com/patents/US6368227

5. http://www.google.com/patents/US6025810

6. http://www.google.com/patents/US6612440

If only the banana had some kind of built-in protective shell. :)

I wonder if one could patent, say, "a means for ambulatory locomotion utilising appendages of bipedal mammals" - I.e. walking.

It's worth noting that having a patent doesn't mean it's enforceable, or even valid.

It's also worth noting that the burden of proof is on the alleged infringer to convince a court that the patent is invalid. Invalid patents can still cause pain.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/282

Indeed. Attention is given to patent trolls, but not so much (that I'm familiar with anyhow) the incentives around awarding (there are incentives in place to bias the granting of a patent, as opposed to denying one or claw back clauses regarging wrongly granted patents) or voiding patents.

Patent US6025810 (Hyper-light-speed antenna):

"A method to transmit and receive electromagnetic waves which comprises generating opposing magnetic fields having a plane of maximum force running perpendicular to a longitudinal axis of the magnetic field; generating a heat source along an axis parallel to the longitudinal axis of the magnetic field; generating an accelerator parallel to and in close proximity to the heat source, thereby creating an input and output port; and generating a communications signal into the input and output port, thereby sending the signal at a speed faster than light."

(emphasis mine)

http://www.google.com.au/patents/US6025810

It also apparently makes your plants grow faster, from the claims. Going by the sheer level of crackpottery going on in there, I think I can guess what kind of plants grew faster.

Legally you'd run into §101 problems for patenting a natural occurrence. And you'd run into prior art problems because people have been walking before your patent.

Could you slip one through the patent office? Probably not anymore.

But a big weakness in the patent examination process is that the USPTO mostly relies on other patents and academic articles. So sometimes you can get some commonly known and well understood products and processes patented because the USPTO doesn't find any written evidence of prior art.

Brought back memories of Phil Karn (AKA KA9Q) discussing this very patent fifteen years ago:

http://www.ka9q.net/patents/

On a similar front, there was recently a kickstarter (that failed) trying to make a cat exercise/play device using a visible red laser: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danprovost/obi-a-smart-...

They also had a couple podcast episodes on the product: http://www.relay.fm/tc

...beam of invisible light

Yeah seems to me they purposely excluded visible light. Hard to see why.

Chapeau.

Sounds like the idea is that the beam itself is invisible, and it becomes visible once it hits something. Poorly worded though.

So you can work around this patent with a fog machine?

This is the first HN headline to ever make me snort out loud!

I originally considered making the title "Patent US5443036: method of inducing aerobic exercise in an unrestrained cat", which is what it says in claim 1.

"a beam of invisible light"... invisible? can feline eyes see a larger section of the electromagnetic spectrum than humans?

I am sure the idea of patents must be originated by rich people of old time for obvious reasons.

Actually, the idea of patents was the exact inverse of what it has ended up as. Patent law came about to limit the period of exclusivity of inventions, and to bring them to the public domain sooner than otherwise, through the necessary acts of disclosure in patenting an idea. Until patents companies and inventors hoarded their ideas as they had no legal protection.

Patents have now ended up enforcing exactly that which they were supposed to oppose - corporate monopolies on thought.

One should question whether the patent system has ever worked in the way that it was intended to. There are examples of a dysfunctional patent system from centuries ago.

Just to name a few examples... The often quoted example of steam engines and the patents of James Watt: the power output of steam engines (an objective, quantitative measurement) stagnated during the period Watt's patents were valid. Only after they expired, steam engines started improving.

Another example: the contributions of the Wright brothers to modern aviation. The Wrights filed for a lot of patents but most of their inventions fell into obscurity as aircraft manufacturers opted to use patent-free inventions from the Wrights' competitors, such as De Havilland's rear stabilizer design which is still common in modern aircraft.

I'm not convinced that the patent system has ever worked to genuinely promote innovation and invention. There are numerous examples of how it has done the exact opposite by stagnating a field of science and technology (e.g. video codecs today).

Several high profile inventors such as Thomas Edison have spent the latter days of their lives as businessmen and lawyers protecting their patents and financial interests, not inventing and innovating.

You could claim that the patent system was raging success.

The Wright brothers tried to hinder development of airplanes, but De Havilland managed to circumvent their patent. Creating entirely new technology in the process.

Watt on the other hand managed to protect his steam engine patent and went on to invent a copying machine with the money.

And Edison, mediocre inventor who luckily made some patent money early with the quadruplex telegraph. Then he could concentrate to his true calling of enslaving scientists.

I'm half joking here. But we really can't know how history would have turned out if patents would not exist. So far I'm not convinced with any of the alternatives. Even with the glaring flaws of the current patent system.

Edison gets a lot of flack for some things he did (especially in the context of Tesla) but he certainly was a great inventor. Many of his inventions did come from working with the people he employed, but they were nowhere near "enslaved". No more than employees at Google or Facebook are.

Furthermore, a lot of the accusations levied against him are just outright false. For instance, the "electrocution of an elephant":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_%28elephant%29

Edit - more about Edison: http://www.nj.com/middlesex/index.ssf/2013/02/oatmeal_comic_...

It was joke, but thanks for the correction. I'd like to point out that leading scientists to make big bunch of inventions would be great feat in it's own right. Leadership alone is diffucult, scientists don't accept just anybody as their superior and you need expert level hunch about technology too.

The story of the Watt patent holding up steam development has been busted as a myth:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1589712

The Wright patent certainly was influential and used all over the place. Their litigation did force the invention of alternatives. Innovation through forced workarounds had long been one of the rationalizations of patent systems. However, very few of them were non-infringing. Indeed a criticism of their patents was that they were way too broad and covered everything, but courts time and again gave them broad scope because they were deemed that inventive.

As an aside, before anyone brings it up, the related story that the Wright patent held back the US airplane industry has also been shown to be a myth, as demonstrated by industrial data fun the period:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673

If you think work is stagnating in video codecs, it's mostly because the low hanging fruit had been picked.

Examples of the patent system creating benefits (as well as costs) can be readily found by searching ssrn for keywords around patents. Focus on studies that use empirical data. Also if one study looks too convincing, look for others that cite it, there may be one that busts it :-)

A lot of the conceptions people have about patents are based on falsehoods and uncritical acceptance of what somebody on the internet said. This need not be the case when we have a number of relevant studies to look at.

Thanks for the links. They might not convince me to change my views on patents but it's always nice to get the facts straight.

Video codecs certainly have had the low hanging fruit picked, but if you look at the situation with video on the web today (ie. consumer level tech, not state of the art), the situation is not much better than in 1998 (to exaggerate a little): we're still using badly implemented browser plugins. We use Flash video because Adobe et al have the patent issue covered. Yes, HTML5 video exists but the actual codecs are such an IP and patent minefield that out-of-the-box support for video (esp. in open source browsers) isn't really ready for prime time.

The "bringing invention to the public sphere" is the least persuasive argument for patent law. Trade secrets are actually protected under our current system. So companies can patent technology that is easily reverse engineerable, and then keep the other stuff as trade secrets--never giving the info the public domain.

Google has tons of patents but their secret sauce is private. Intel has patents on their devices, but their semiconductor processes are closely held secrets.

Companies have their cake and eat it too.

The more persuasive argument is that patents encourage invention by rewarding it. If it costs 1 billion to develop a product that create 10 billion worth of value but the inventor won't be able to capture more than 500 million of the value, the inventor won't spend the money.

The other good argument that nobody seems to make is just a fundamental property right. You create the invention, you own it. Real estate property was first doled out like that. First to claim it, keeps it.

You're only presenting half the story.

Only certain ideas (production methods implemented in shops or factories, for example) could be hoarded. Other ideas had to be disseminated in order to create economic value from them, like the classic example of a "better mousetrap." There's no way to sell a better mousetrap without revealing how it traps mice. Anyone who buys one can disassemble it and then build their own.

Without patents, small inventors are defenseless against bigger organizations, which can replicate the invention, manufacture it faster, and put more marketing dollars behind it.

Patent protection, like many federal laws, is a balance. On one side, it does not allow the replication of inventions without permission of the inventor, to protect small inventors. On the other side, as you mention, it requires public disclosure of the invention, so that method inventions that would normally be secret forever can eventually be used by the public.

> Without patents, small inventors are defenseless against bigger organizations, which can replicate the invention, manufacture it faster, and put more marketing dollars behind it.

The reverse is also true.

With patents, small inventors are defenseless against aggressive litigation from deep-pocketed bigger organizations. If an inventor is small in a strict sense, he certainly doesn't have a few million dollars to spare to defend himself in court.

It's not about patents, it's about the terminally broken system.

The big problem with patents in the USA right is almost exactly the opposite of big guy suing little guy.

We have little guys (patent trolls) suing the largest most profitable companies on earth.

I think the core of the matter is the weird idea of "intellectual property" which is different from the idea of "physical property" as you can copy/paste intellectual property but you cannot do so with physical property.

The English crown apparently introduced something like patents when it found itself too constricted by parliament.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_patent

Maybe I'm a bit tired but read first "Patent US5443036 - Method of exorcising a cat". Well, either way it's funny ;)

Stop stealing my ideas!