Friday Fun: The Onion on How To File A Patent (and a few more serious readings)

Oh, The Onion. You are so wonderful and your take on the world of patents is so spot on that it hurts.

What are patents for, anyways?

Here's a bit of an excerpt from their 11 Step Program. Drop by the site to see the rest. Brilliant.

Step 1: First, come up with something really cool, like a cheese grater that works in both directions. Oh shit, don’t steal that one! That’s mine!

Step 2: Research the marketplace to find out if your idea is original or if some asshole has already stolen it from you
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Step 11:
Spend remainder of bitter, unnaturally truncated life filing lawsuits to protect patent

For your edification, here are a couple of readings on the state of the patent world.

More like this

ESP is a new organization formed for the purpose of putting an end to the madness.
SCOTUSblog explains the excellent unanimous decision in KSR v. Teleflex.
Queen's University engineering librarian Michael White runs The Patent Librarian's Notebook, a very important resource for anyone interested in finding and making sense of patent information.
"Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) announced [on July 24th] that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected four key Monsanto patents related to genetically modified crops that PUBPAT challenged last year because the agricultural giant is using them to harass, intimidate, sue - an

Thanks John,

Thought I would share a couple of my favourite patents:

Centrifugal Birthing Table, just look at the pictures!
http://www.google.ca/patents/US3216423

User-operated amusement apparatus for kicking the user's buttocks:
http://www.google.ca/patents/US6293874

Catflap that detects the colour of the cat and if it is not the right colour, sends down a nuclear bomb from orbit to kill the cat.
http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio;jsessionid=kqS…

By Simon Pratt (not verified) on 05 Feb 2016 #permalink