12:01 Tuesday

Contest of the Week

Although the USPTO's search database is adequate for many tasks, there are some questions that it just can't handle.  Like this one:

What's the greatest number of co-inventors you've ever seen listed on a U.S. patent?

Submit an entry by email (including # inventors and patent number) by 12:01AM Tuesday, May 26, 2009.  And just so you know, we learned today that if your answer isn't bigger than 31, you're not going to win.

Winner gets a free ice cream cone at Baskin-Robbins.

That's FRAHn-ken-steen... (Patent of the Week II)

I'm assured by some of my biology-oriented colleagues that such things are patented all the time, and there is no 101 problem.  (Dupont received its famous patent on the Oncomouse--a transgenic rodent altered to have increased susceptibility to cancer--in 1988.)  Nevertheless, I can't help but get a crazy image in my head whenever I read the title and claims of this patent that issued on Tuesday:

U.S. Patent No. 7,524,491 Non-human animals with human-glial chimeric brains Filed: January 16, 2008 Assignee: University of Rochester 1. A non-human mammal with at least 30% of all its glial cells in its corpus callosum being human glial cells and/or at least 5% of all its glial cells in the white matter of its brain and/or brain stem being human glial cells.

Two prosecution questions: 1) Only 15 months from filing to issuance, and no Accelerated Examination.  Why can't we see that in the "digital arts?"  2) I'm not used to the "and/or" language getting past the examiners, but I suppose it is not a 112 problem if there's no resulting ambiguity.

By the way, I hear that the donor for those human glial cells was a woman.  I can't quite recall her name... Abby something.

The Sport of the Patent

It's finally breaking 70 degrees in Chicago today, and leading into a weekend, no less.  I expect many of us will be in the park, playing catch or just enjoying the weather.  But for those of you who just can't leave the patent world behind while you recreate, here's some food for thought.

We all know that baseball is America's pastime, and we all know that sports have become big business.  So let's ask: what sport has been the subject of the most patents?  A simple proxy is to search the USPTO database for all utility patents with titles containing the sport's name:

Interesting.  That's a "4" for Jai-alai, by the way. Tennis actually nudges out baseball (though including "softball" pushes it over).  And as of this week, Football and Basketball are tied with exactly 800 patents apiece.

But there's one sport missing from the chart above... hmm...:

Holy cow! 14,510 patents!  That's about 50% more than these other sports combined. Is golf really that much more popular in the marketplace than anything else?  Or does it have more technological underpinnings that allow for innovation?  Perhaps it's all those frisbee golf/disc golf patents. (Not.  There's 18). [4/25/09 UPDATE: These numbers are for utility patents only.  There are an additional 4,900 design patents for golf.]

And what about over time?  If we track the number of golf patents issued each year, we see an unsurprising correlation:

Go figure.  There are a couple of noteworthy points.  First, as you'd expect, tracking all patents issued over time also roughly matches the stock market and the economy. 

But Golf seems to be an even tighter fit:

In other words, starting in around 1983, golf "patent market share" grew significantly and.. could it possibly be... actually led Wall Street by a few years??  That would seem strange, considering that these are patent issuances, not application filings.. and you'd think there would be more interest in golf after the market goes up, not before. If anything there should be a lag effect.

I don't consider myself a statistician, and these results are less than scientific.  But I'd be intereted in your theories.

So please think about it as you hit the tees or shoot hoops or (my fave) watch the Stanley Cup playoffs this weekend, and let me know what you come up with.  And if you'd like to play with the underlying data yourself, shoot me a note and I'll pass it along.

[UPDATE: 4/26/2009 - Just found this nice blog: http://www.golf-patents.com/ about Golf IP issues, by patent attorney David Dawsey.  Now how many other sports have their own patent blog?

[UPDATE 2: 4/26/2009 - There another one: http://www.patentlygolf.com/ ]

Drafted by Beavis?

I typically don't enjoy this type of humor.  Really.  However, my almost-5-year-old daughter has recently discovered endless joy in displaying her tush to the family while singing and dancing to an accompanying original composition ("The Butt Song"), so I couldn't help from laughing when I saw the title of this patent that issued today:

U.S. Patent No. 7,520,681:

Butt coupling structure and method of photonic quantum ring hole emitter.

Heh heh... He said "ring hole"...