McDonalds Files To Patent Making a Sandwich 346
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "McDonalds has applied for patent WO2006068865, which carries the title 'METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MAKING A SANDWICH.' John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, can eat his heart out (unless that's been patented, too). Undoubtedly, some people are contemplating whether there's anything novel in this patent that is somehow obscured by its generic title. Feel free to examine their flowchart for yourself and see exactly how novel their sandwich 'subroutines' are. The good news is that, given that it only mentions generic sandwich making 'tool(s),' rather than any specific machine, it might not survive after the In Re Bilski decision, which was meant to put a stop to absurdities such as this. But until McDonalds's application is rejected or invalidated, make sure you don't use their flowchart when making sandwiches. After all, if you 'apply appropriate condiments to appropriate compartment,' you might infringe upon their IP."
Can you really patent food preparation? (Score:2, Interesting)
Published 30 years ago... (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if all of the McManuals that cover all of this McStuff
nullify any attempt by McDonalds to patent any of this stuff. I
am sure there are 20 year old Manuals that cover all of this
stuff.
Someone with a franchise archive would be the best person to show
prior art perversely enough.
Save us, McDonald's! (Score:5, Interesting)
"There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."
--Bill Gates, on the motivations of those who seek to reform patent law.
Stainless Steel Rat has Prior Art! (Score:3, Interesting)
You know what this reminds me of? The Stainless Steel Rat series.
In A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born(1985) there's a chain of restaurants serving Porcuswine(a mix between a pig and a porcupine, as large as a cow). The important thing? It describes a system pretty much as you state - that upon order placement automated systems make a burger, fresh from frozen, using automated equipment. It's so automated the restaurants are unmanned - a cleaning service comes through every so often, and they restock the robotic kitchen around once a week - or as they're notified that it's running short on stuff.
If this is simply a system for automating 'throwing a bun & burger on the grill when the order comes in', I'm sure there's all sorts of automated systems that already do it.
Thing is - that 60 second delay from refrigerated meat patty to cooked* can both reduce waste and increase taste/freshness, improving their product and increasing savings in a time of increasing food and wage costs. Heck, you can have 'anticipated' cooking - where the patty & bun is started when the order is entered into the computer. You don't get cancels that often, and in a busy restaurant, the patty would be usable anyways - at this time McD's only has two different sized patties.
*It currently takes ~90 seconds from frozen patty to cooked patty. With a refrigerated one, you could do it even faster.
Re:Note to non-Americans (Score:3, Interesting)
The confusion in that particular situation was exacerbated by the fact that he was clearly trying to up-sell me to a meal when all I wanted was the burger. When you're already experiencing culture shock, having someone pretend they don't understand you is the last thing you need.
Re:With a side of broken links... (Score:5, Interesting)
Respectfully, a broken link was the least of the problems with that summary. Either you are woefully uninformed about IP (which seriously harms the credibility of your little crusade), or you are deliberately misleading people. If you are going to crusade against patents, you ought to have a basic understanding of them. You should know what gives the patent scope (the claims, not the title). And you clearly have either not read Bilski at all, or you did not comprehend a single word of it. Bilski has no bearing on a method for making a sandwich. Bilski does not say "all patents that Slashdot anti-IP trolls dislike are now invalid."
In short, if you have some meaningful argument against patents in principle, please present it. On the other hand, if the substance of that argument is, "Look, McDonald's applied for a patent on a method of making a sandwich, LOL" then I counter that you have not proved that a novel and non-obvious method of making a sandwich should not be patentable. You certainly haven't proved anything about this method, since you have read no more than the title. And failing to prove a specific case does not magically translate into proving the general proposition.
Re:Drive Through user patents coffee burning metho (Score:3, Interesting)
...that doesn't change the fact that nothing sold for the purposes of oral consumption should be hot enough to cause third degree burns on external tissue, even in one's sensitive nether regions, let alone in a 3 cent cup with a 1 cent lid.
You do know that it is impossible to get third degree burns from boiling coffee. Once the coffee leaves the dispenser it is now in a state of cooling off from ~212F. The worst you could burn yourself is second degree. A third degree burn tends to require an active flame or strong acid, neither of which are available in a cup of McDonalds coffee.
I personally think that the store doesn't need to posts a warning that the coffee is hot. Coffee is supposed to be hot (iced coffee not included). Its called personal responsibility.
Re:hai! (Score:4, Interesting)
Thank you.
Pished as I am (nice bottle btw) I can't help but think this is obvious.
What we need is a typing device that can interpret it's drunken owners keystrokes so that a comment like this doesn't take nearly 5 in to type.
When I make mistakes, I try to learn from them. (Score:5, Interesting)
My mistakes are due to knowing more about what patents ought to be than what they are. One need not understand every bit of law to know when its effects are harmful, after all.
Anyhow, I seriously question any claim that there's something 'novel' about this method of making a sandwich. I think lots of people are able to do something else while waiting for something else (like a microwave) to finish cooking. And any time you do something more than once, it's simple enough to break it down into sub-tasks and do each of those before moving on. Lastly, serving the oldest burger first is pretty much exactly as expected.
While you're right that this isn't a purely mental process, it's a rather menial one. Yes, there's a little bit of information buried in there about what "tools" the sandwich maker uses. But lacking very much information about that, even what little is in the claims is pretty damn useless.
So yes, my purpose was mostly to let people laugh at a silly patent. My 'crusade' as you call it, though, is merely to get people to change weird and arbitrary laws to sensible, enforceable ones that respect the Constitutional directive to 'promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts'. I'm too well aware of the fact that it's easier said than done, but it's pretty obvious that some things aren't working.
I did realize that the patent hadn't issued yet. It's the 'rejected' part of 'rejected or invalidated' because the two aren't the same thing. For picking over everything I might or might not realize so carefully, how did you miss that? I guess I'm not the only one whose brain can do short-circuit evaluation of an 'or' clause.
[Pedants, please note that I know that you are only permitted to skip evaluation of the second half if the first half is true. Even so, I am referring back to his complaint that I ignored half of the machine-or-transformation test.]
Also, I do actually know that the claims are more important than the title, it's just that the flowchart is much more comprehensible than the text of the patent. Normal people, who might in theory want to make use of this patent when it expires, have a hard enough time understanding technology of any sort to begin with. You add legalese to that and the patent becomes worthless as a description of anything. Even though it's supposed to help those "skilled in the art" to duplicate the invention (which art? law??).
Patents as they exist now are a profit center for patent lawyers and a business expense for industry. No one I have ever known derives useful information for them (even though we have patents to get people to disclose their inventions...) and even if they wanted to, they'd be liable for triple damages for willful infringement if they were found to have read someone's patent before it expired.
So maybe we should be reversing this line of questioning. What good are patents? They create a huge legal expense. Why are they worth that?
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property [eff.org]
Re:When I make mistakes, I try to learn from them. (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem I see is you're conflating two complaints. If you think it's obvious, fine. You gave some reasonable grounds for why you think some limitations might be obvious. But that's not the same thing as saying, "They're trying to patent sandwiches!!1!1 They can't do that!" There's no reason an improved method for making a sandwich can't be statutory subject matter. It's a method of making something. That is exactly what method patents are supposed to be. If it also happens to be new and non-obvious, hooray, you have a patent.
I suspect that you and I will not agree. You seem to be hostile to IP as a matter of principle. You're entitled to that opinion, and I'm not likely to agree. IP is my bread and butter, and most of the time, from what I've seen, it is used right (though I also have clients who have been sued on stupid patents). But if you're going to go on an anti-IP crusade, at least know what you're talking about. Try this paper [jw.com] written by one of the partners I work for. It's a very good, very accessible layman's primer on IP. And being informed makes you much more persuasive.
Re:With a side of broken links... (Score:3, Interesting)
Having said that, I HAVE read the application and the method is the same one that every fast food company, every sandwich shop and, I would guess, the vast majority of restaurants of any size uses to make sandwiches. Why would McDonald's even apply for a patent with such obvious and huge stores of prior art. Even if the patent is approved it will never stand up in court. Unless they pan to patent troll mom and pop restaurants that can't afford lawyers.