Patent number 4,022,227 was apparently issued May 10, 1977, so I don’t know if it has expired or not. (I also don’t know why it won a prize at this year’s Ig Nobels.) Regardless, how in the hell did it ever get issued? Were they on just as much crack in the late 1970s as they are now? And crack wasn’t even invented until the 1980s! They have one hell of a supplier. (I wonder… is the process of illegally selling Southeast Asian drugs in the US to fund CIA operations patented?)
Bah. Bah, I say! This ignorance makes my head hurt. I’ll need a combover after I finish rending my follicles in a vain attempt to comprehend stupidity of this magnitude.
I’m looking for a rational justification for this. Maybe when the website says Patent' it really means Documentation of Public Knowledge’ or something similar that would make the USPTO seem a bit less blatantly, blazingly, blitheringly, blusteringly, bloomingly, bloody moronic for having this document on file. But I just can’t convince myself of that. The page says `Patent’, and patent is the stupidity I behold before me when I cast my eyes USPTO-ward. There’s an idea: Patent patent stupidity in patents, and the issuance thereof, and then sue the USPTO for its violation. The USPTO will be forced to admit that it either issued a prima facie invalid document, and hopefully force real change in the institution, or it will need to fine itself, and vanish in a puff of legalism.
I think the most reasonable explanation is that someone was having themselves a bit of a joke. Although I agree that the patent shouldn’t have been granted due to prior art. Except that Prior Art probably wears a tonsure and not a combover.
I think it only applies to being paid for doing a combover in that exact way. There’s also a patent for using a laserpointer to entertain cats, that doesn’t mean anyone who entertains a cat with a laserpointer has to pay a royalty to the person who filed the application.
Finagle: Yes, it was submitted as a joke. Most people would only do something this absurd in the context of a really, really obvious joke. The USPTO isn’t most people.
In other words, and to paraphrase a classic among cartoons: You can’t fool the USPTO cause it’s a moron.
ultrafilter: You’d need to find a supremely moronic or antisocial judge to make something like this stick. Most judges are neither, so this has all the de facto legal force of someone claiming to be King of San Francisco.
Our system works, but our Patent Office is supremely broken.
As a postscript, this is why people who have a better-than-passing understanding of software and programming feel fear and loathing at the idea of software patents. We argue about how you shouldn’t be able to patent logic and math, and about how it would kill the whole industry, but we, deep down, realize the utter idiocy of the Patent Office in this country, and how badly it can be gamed by any corporation rich enough. The League for Programming Freedom, formed in the wake of the `look-and-feel’ lawsuit, is leading the way in this fight.
They’ve only been awarding Ig Nobels since '91 with an Engineering category in '93 (Ron “Mr. Infomercial” Popeil), '98 (the anti-bear suit), 2003, and this year.