Ridiculous Patents #2: The Wheel
Do you live in Australia? Do you use a wheel (yes -- a wheel)? Then you may be infringing John Keogh's patent.
But hold on -- there is an interesting twist to this story. Mr. Keogh filed this patent with the express intention of emphasizing how the "patent system was flawed because submissions could be prepared without professional help and did not need to be examined by the Australian patent office." The Australian patent office itself claims that applications such as this are fraudulent, but, as far as is known, the patent has never been invalidated.
I appears that Mr. Keogh's main complaint is that the patent system can be used without lawyers (he is a freelance patent lawyer, so the change in the Australian system threatens his livelihood). No complaints, as far as we can find, from Mr. Keogh about the inherent problems with the patent system, as long as it requires lawyers.
(Once again, this may be old news to some of you. Just trying to chronicle some of the most egregious examples of bad patents.)
* thanks to anonymous poster for pointing out additional information regarding this patent.
But hold on -- there is an interesting twist to this story. Mr. Keogh filed this patent with the express intention of emphasizing how the "patent system was flawed because submissions could be prepared without professional help and did not need to be examined by the Australian patent office." The Australian patent office itself claims that applications such as this are fraudulent, but, as far as is known, the patent has never been invalidated.
I appears that Mr. Keogh's main complaint is that the patent system can be used without lawyers (he is a freelance patent lawyer, so the change in the Australian system threatens his livelihood). No complaints, as far as we can find, from Mr. Keogh about the inherent problems with the patent system, as long as it requires lawyers.
(Once again, this may be old news to some of you. Just trying to chronicle some of the most egregious examples of bad patents.)
* thanks to anonymous poster for pointing out additional information regarding this patent.
posted by Jackson Lenford at 9:19 AM
2 Comments:
I don't have a link but IIRC, he did it to prove how wrong the patent system was. He also said he won't patent fire.
I understand that the applicant surrendered the patent and it has a status of REVOKED since the 30th August 2001
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