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Those swingers at the USPTO
June 29, 2006
Timothy Noah, a senior writer at Slate, does a good job ridiculing the efforts of the US Patent and Trademark Office in a piece titled "How To Swing." The patent, which was ostensibly filed by a five-year-old and which was granted, describes a method of making a child's swing move from side to side (instead of back and forth).
Noah links to a couple of other items on patent absurdity, and he posts an annotated copy of the swing patent application. Unfortunately, I found I needed to use Internet Explorer (instead of my prefered Firefox) to read Noah's annotations. Perhaps Microsoft, which founded
Slate (and subsequently sold it to the
Washington Post), holds a patent on the mouse-flyover-annotation technology that Noah uses.
Posted by Rick Nelson on June 29, 2006 | Comments (2)
