Patent Granted on Sideways Swinging

Matt Van Gundy writes "In another brilliant move by the well loved U.S. Patent and Trademark Office a patent (6,368,227) has been granted to a Mr. Steven Olson for inventing the method of swinging sideways on a swing. The patent even lays claim to "inducing a component of forward and back motion into the swinging motion, resulting in a swinging path that is generally shaped as an oval." I claim prior art, but perhaps I am one of the few fortunate ones who enjoyed this method of swinging long before its 'invention' by Mr. Steven Olson. " My favorite line from the patent : "The user may even choose to produce a Tarzan-type yell while swinging in the manner described, which more accurately replicates swinging on vines in a dense jungle forest. Actual jungle forestry is not required."

Re:April Fool's is long past

[shyster]

What I can't figure out with this (and other stupid patents) is why it takes 1500 words to describe a method of swinging!?! Evidently, the patent office gets wowed by "technical" words such as parallel, perpendicular, and X-axis. Then, they are no longer able to think rationally and approve the patent.

Or perhaps the boring, dry, technical aspect of these patent claims put them in a hypnotic trance. I guess that's why patent lawyers are paid the big bucks.

This is great!

[Mister Transistor]

This is absolutely the best thing that could happen - getting more and more ridiculous patents approved. This will prove to people once and for all the USPTO is obviously approving these things in their sleep. Pretty soon the books will be bulging with absurd patents, and someone will call for a review of ALL the patents issued, and whether or not they actually were deserved and worthy of continued enforcement. A buddy of mine that used to work for a very large electronics manufacturer actually submitted a patent for a picture-window Ant Farm as a joke, and was almost awarded it!

I don't get it

[digitect]

So does this mean the Patent Office now implicitly agrees that they think patents are silly, too?

(BTW, does anybody else see the potential here for using this as a general call for taxpayer revolt? How much did we pay for this? Do our congresspeople approve on wasting such funds? Do they want re-elected?)

Default should be deny.

[Kris_J]

If the patent office can't understand something, it should deny the patent.

If the patent office doesn't have the resources to properly investigate the patent, it should deny it.
If a single company submits too many patents, they should be denied.

Why is the default to allow a patent if it can't be proven not to be original, useful and non-obvious?

I'm not surprised...

[m_evanchik]

This is by the same federal government, (though, to be fair, by a different agency), that issued student visas to the 9-11 hijackers 6 months after the fact.

I'm not a lawyer, but is there anyone out there who is? Wouldn't this sort of gross incompetence bring into question other patents issued, at least by this obviously negligent examiner?

And at least the "Tarzan" yell part gives off the strong suggestion that this was submitted as a goof.

The intellectual property laws in this country have become nonsensical and counter-productive in their execution and enforcement.

Embarassing.

Funny though.

well the patent says

[Tensor]

"Licenses are available from the inventor upon request. "

Which might mean that he will give them out for free ... but it DOES NOT actually say so.

What if he decides to charge elementary schools with swings for using his invention ? and makes the districts pay ... after all he does hold the patent to it

:)

Re:Wrong topic.

[glwtta]

very negligent

That's the point! It's not the person patenting this that's causing the "uproar" it's the patent office.

Re:Default should be deny.

[kinko]

because the view of the USPTO (which gets funding based on the number of patents granted) is that it is better for a U.S. company to have a dodgy patent than a company from some scummy foreign country, where it might be used to harm U.S. commerce.

But also because qualified people who could examine technical patents make far much more in the private sector. Then again, I wonder how qualified you have to be to understand the above patent...

Re:what about copyright infringment

[mbrubeck]

You can't actually be arested over IP (for now at least).

However, you can be thrown in jail, held for weeks, away from family and friends without a hearing, and detained in a foreign country for weeks [freesklyarov.org].

The inventor is a 7 year old

[btempleton]

Folks, this is mostly an amusement patent. The inventor was a seven year old, and of course he's not the first to invent it. But his dad's a patent lawyer and wrote it up for him on a lark.

Like the laser cat-exerciser patent, nothing will ever come of this. It's just there to be silly. Nobody will ever be sued for infringement. Can't there be a sense of humour in this?

Re:Fairly bright?

[briaman]

Don't actually know. In England, public sector workers tend to get significantly less than they would get in the business sector. The obvious consequence is that a lot of the best people migrate out of the public sector. I don't imagine things are much different across the pond.

To be fair...

[Observer]

... to the USPTO, my understanding is that provided an examiner with reasonable knowledge of the field doesn't find any published prior art, then they're under an obligation to issue the patent. And on the whole it's a good thing that examiners' discretion to reject applications is limited to the claims themselves, and not (subjective) assessments of what is or is not ridiculous or useful.

Where USPTO's actions can be justifiably questioned is when decisions are made which appear to show that it does not have (enough) examiners with adequate knowledge of the field concerned, IT being, unfortunately, one of these fields. As has been commented before, the remedy is to improve the scrutiny by taking on additional knowledgable examiners, but this isn't something that can be done overnight even if the neccessary resources were approved by government and legislature: ask yourselves what it would take to persuade you to consider such a career, rather than working in the "real world".

These laws exist to be broken, not adhered to

[Zoop]

Nobody will ever be sued for infringement.

Probably, but the problem with patents is that you can never be sure, can you? Unlike with trademark, which is subject to dilution, patents can be allowed to exist as long as the term is granted and even on the last day, someone can sue another person (even if they ignore someone standing next to them doing the same thing--it's totally up to them). It's a great harassment tool.

The fact that such a waste of the taxpayers' money was able to go through the system indicates just how easy it is to do...provided you can afford a patent lawyer. If not, you're SOL.

Corporations patent things largely because they fear just these things--so everybody sets up a system where they think they can scare everyone else from suing them because they might also be sued for some obscure patent. In effect, they don't expect anyone to NOT violate their patents--they just want it to make sure you can't sue them over one of yours.

That is an increasing trend in law. Laws and regulations exist not to be adhered to, but to insure that someone has broken some law and that fact can be used against them as leverage. So if the city decides they can't afford eminent domain (where they have to pay you usually below-market prices for any property of yours they take to widen a road, for example), they simply find you guilty of one of the many ordinances they have and stick you with a massive fine--unless you agree to settle with them for the property they want.

The danger with this is, aside from the obvious abuses, that it degrades respect for the law. Eventually, it fuels a very combative relationship with the government--which, combined with the size and intrusiveness of modern government is why you can't even drive past the White House on one side anymore. They're afraid of you.

So no, this patent by itself isn't anything to worry about...it's a symptom of the larger set of problems, not all of which have to do purely with the patent office.

Re:Default should be deny.

[armb]

> If the patent office can't understand something, it should deny the patent.

If the patent office can't understand a swing, things are even worse than we thought.

> If a single company submits too many patents, they should be denied.

How many is too many? Maybe hundreds or thousands of IBM's patents really are reasonable, original, useful and non-obvious. Applying for lots of patents might sometimes be a sign of abuse of the system, but denying patents after some arbitrary number is unfair to large companies doing lots of research. If it costs money to submit a patent application, and dodgy ones are rejected, companies will reduce dodgy submissions without a limit on how many they can have.

Anyway, large companies could just get individuals or spin-off companies to patent stuff and then licence them back to the companies on favourable terms.

Re:I don't get it

[NewtonsLaw]

Come on folks -- it's unreasonable to expect the patent office to act as judge and jury in respect to patent claims -- that's what the courts are for.

Registering a patent does not prove that you were first to come up with an idea or invention -- it simply provides you with the ability to prove that you were in posession of such knowledge at the time you filed the registration.

In effect -- a patent is little more than proof of knowledge at a specific time/date, and a right to sue.

If we were to place the onus of verifying each application's technical merit and freedom from prior art -- then it's unlikely that anyone other than the large corporates could afford to register their inventions.

Re:Default should be deny.

[ZanshinWedge]

A patent does not specifically have any legal standing by itself. It is up to the courts to decide the legitimacy of a patent. To require a full level of investigation of a patent and prior art would make getting any patent far too difficult. The way patents work now are they way they *should* work.

The problem comes when we have blatantly stupid patents and blatantly stupid courts and blatantly stupid people. A company can use a baseless patent with no backing in the courts to harrass other companies, organizations, or individuals, especially if those organizations have less resources for things like legal battles.

Lawyers and Self-Perpetuation

[inKubus]

I think lawyers (as well as computer scientists) are simply guilty of creating the system which they work with. Lawyers created the legal system in such a way to require lawyers. Computer scientists have created computer systems to require computer scientists. It's classic self-validation, self-preservation, self-ishness that drives the capitalist USSA.

I think it's wonderful, because you create your own job. I just wish I knew more about law, because that is the fastest growing self-perpetuating system and is probably going to be a VERY good business to be in (it already is).

Lawyers will tell you (and rightfully so) that as the world gets more complex, and the world population grows larger, the possibility of dispute increases accordingly. Of course, they neglect to mention the fact that they are the major cause of dispute..

But, really, it's amazing that 6 or 7 billion people can all pretty much get along on one planet, and really, unfair stuff doesn't happen all that often. But, to remain on topic, it is pretty funny when a system we setup to be foolproof ends up making a fool of us all.

I think this should be a lesson to all the judges out there: they need to take much more into consideration than just a patent application. And they do. If only they couldn't be bribed.

The problem is...

[Ecyrd]

...that the USPTO is not responsible for the patents it has granted. If they were responsible, then someone could sue them for issuing a bad patent. That would certainly get their attention.

Hey, you issued those guys a bad patent, causing our company to go through a very expensive legal process. We are suing you for $25M damages and legal fees that we wouldn't have suffered if you hadn't screwed up.

Re:Wrong topic.

[Lonath]

Yes it is something to get your panties in a knot about. If the USPTO allows bullshit patents like this through, then how many bullshit software patents are there? It costs a million dollars+ to break even one patent. Remember that even if this is a "joke", the owner can sue someone for use of this and they can bankrupt a normal person since a normal person isn't sitting on millions of dollars. This is a perfect example of what's wrong with the patent office granting patents on any old thing.

As another example, should the USPTO be granting patents on some little rinky-dink calculations in CIFS so MS can stop SAMBA from existing? It's the same bullshit anything-goes mentality that gets us patents like that.

Are you tired of obvious patents?

[Deven]

If you're tired of obvious patents like this, then do something about it! This patent is a golden opportunity to shine some light on the disgrace that the patent office has become. This is a smoking gun!

The computer industry suffers increasingly from bad patents being granted on obvious techniques which are far from novel. This trend is obvious to us, but not so clearcut to those outside the industry. An XOR cursor may be obvious to a programmer, but sounds quite novel and non-obvious to a layperson. This patent should be blatently obvious to anyone, including your elected representatives!

Everyone who reads Slashdot and hates to see obvious patents should print out this patent, schedule a face-to-face meeting with their elected representatives, show them this ridiculous patent and use it to drive home the point we've been trying to make for years -- that the patent office is out of control and completely ignoring the "novel and non-obvious" standards that the law sets before patent protection is warranted. If enough of us do this, Congress might actually get the hint and start taking patent reform seriously. And this patent doesn't require them to take our word for it; they can see for themselves how absurd this patent is! It doesn't matter if this patent was requested as a lark; it was granted and has the full force of law behind it.

We need Congress to be outraged about this patent as an example of the corruption in the system. Whether or not this particular patent could or would ever be enforced is irrelevant; if patents are granted on obvious methods, it harms the public interest by granting a legal monopoly on the obvious. That impedes progress and economic growth, endangers companies and jobs, and erodes public trust and confidence in the government -- all things that Congress ought to care about...

Why it's upsetting

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, it's a joke on the inventor's part. But the USPTO granted the patent. Here's what's upsetting: they apply the same lack of standards to other fields.

There are an awful lot of computer programming patents that, to any competent programmer, are as obvious and silly as this. But since it's outside of most people's expertise, it's impossible to argue that fact to non-programmers, and the patent-holder gets away with statements about protecting all the hard work that went into their intellectual property.

Re:In That Case...

[maxpublic]

Sometimes government workers, especially those lower down on the food chain, think that the system sucks too. And they will actively work to point out the flaws in such a fashion as to make it painfully obvious to even the most brain-dead of folks that something is wrong in Bureaucracy-Land.

I can't imagine that the clerk who saw this wasnt' aware of the absurdity of the situation. No doubt he/she looked at it as the perfect opportunity to point out the silliness of current ip laws, especially in his now-incredibly-overworked office. And I'm sure that someone higher up the chain - a management type - is giving him shit about it.

Max

Re:Fairly bright?

[markmoss]

In England, public sector workers tend to get significantly less than they would get in the business sector. What is (possibly) different on this side of the pond is that we often grossly increase the pay of public sector workers and the quality doesn't improve. In the case of school teachers, the personnel quality has actually declined quite a lot in my lifetime, even though their paychecks have increased greatly, both absolutely and in comparison to most other workers. Forty years ago public schools around here paid about like sweeping the floor in a unionized auto plant, and people that found they hated teaching almost all got out. Now they are likely to stay in, because without significant talents or an education far more rigorous than teacher's courses, they can't get another job paying nearly as well.

Fire the incompetents? Never happens in gov't service. I ran into two incompetent teachers in public schools, from 1958-1971. (By the way, on this side of the pond "public school" means 100% tax-supported and government-controlled, by distinction to tuition-charging "private schools". Private schools often provide superior education at 1/2 the per-pupil budget.) One incompetent was in her first year teaching; my 6th grade class drove her into a "nervous breakdown", and she didn't come back for a second year. The other one had been in the same job 20 years already, and had been just as incompetent all along -- I have no idea why he stayed, except he probably was too lazy to keep _any_ real job.) But when my son reached high-school age, about 50% of the local public high-school staff didn't know the subjects they were teaching. Needless to say, he didn't go there.

Now for the real bad news: apply this principle to airport security. The past: underpaid McDonald's rejects working for private security firms. The present: the same McDonald's rejects shifting to the government payroll. The future: McDonald's rejects that cannot be fired, drawing three times the pay at taxpayer's expense...