Chaos Magnet

If you can't beat 'em...

I rant about _blank">stupid patents all the time, but mostly because it's very rare that I see a controversial patent that I would consider "non-obvious". Maybe it's because I think about how to do these things all the time, even though I rarely have time to implement any of them. Well, I've finally had it.

I had an idea for a project last year, and it would have been fantastic. I'm not going to tell you what it was, but I can prove it would have been very successful, because I've just found out there's a company doing it, and very successfully. Now, I can deal with that. I didn't do it because I didn't have time.

But they patented it!!! So now, not only am I not the first to do this, I can't even do it at all!!

So that's it. It turns out that while a traditional Utility Patent (meaning just about everything but design patents) is only $380 to file -- more to actually have it issued and so on -- it turns out you can file a Provisional patent application for only $75. Maybe I ought to be doing that with my ideas.

I was an Inventor on 9 patents -- which, by the way, I ALSO thought were obvious, but the company disagreed -- and I remember what a pain it was to put together the application, but by G-d I've had enough!

Technorati tags: patents | patent | stupid patents | application | technology | inventions | invention |

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