Mastodawn

I was therefore quite surprised to find a US patent for a gas chamber, a sealed room for conducting executions by poison gas (US 2,802,462 to Williams, Aug 13, 1957).

Well. This necessarily implies that a gas chamber for killing prisoners must have a moral utility. So, either the execution of prisoners by the state using a gas chamber is, in itself, a moral utility, or there is some OTHER use for the gas chamber that WOULD BE considered a moral utility.

Weird.

3/3

#Patents #PatentLaw

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PAgent 🇺🇦2d ago

Even earlier, however, in his opinion for Lowell v. Lewis (15 F. Cas. 1018, 1019, C.C.D. Mass. 1817) Justice Story stated that "All that the law requires is, that the invention should not be frivolous or injurious to the well-being, good policy, or sound morals of society. The word ‘useful,’ therefore, is incorporated into the [patent] act in contradistinction to mischievous or immoral. For instance, a new invention to poison people, or to promote debauchery, or to facilitate private assassination, is not a patentable invention.” (cont)

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#Patents #PatentLaw

PAgent 🇺🇦2d ago

When I was a baby patent agent, I was taught that US patent law had a "moral utility" requirement. That is, the US Patent and Trademark Office would not grant a patent on any invention having no moral utility.

The cited example was Rickard v. Du Bon (103 F. 868, 2d Cir. 1900): A patent on a method of putting spots on tobacco leaves was held invalid, because the only purpose of doing so was to make lower-quality tobacco *appear* to be higher quality, although it did not improve the tobacco in any way.

Since the leaf-spotting method had no utility that wasn't immoral, the patent was invalidated. (cont)

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#Patents #PatentLaw

TheBadPlace 4d ago

All Content from Business Insider | A startup building the Harvey for patent law has raised $40 million by Melia Russell

Arthur Jen and Paul Lee.Patlytics

Patlytics builds software for law firms and businesses to automate patent filing and litigation.The startup has raised $40 million in new funding, putting it out in front of the IP-tech landscape.Its CEO says Harvey paved the way, but it can't easily match the nuanced tasks Patlytics handles.As Harvey and Legora race to become the main AI tool for lawyers, a wave of startups is going deeper, building software for more specialized work. Patlytics is one of them, betting that the future of legal tech won't be broad platforms, but software that can handle the complexity others can't.

Founded by Paul Lee and Arthur Jen, Patlytics automates the entire patent lifecycle, helping customers with everything from invention disclosures and filing to complex portfolio management and IP litigation.

A secretive market fills upRead the original article on Business Insider

#funding #legal-ai #legal-tech #patents #startups

A startup building the Harvey for patent law has raised $40 million

Patlytics raised the new funding after securing more than 40% of the AmLaw 100 firms and growing revenue about 10x in a single year.

Business Insider

Nikolai Hampton 💾6d ago

Ok.. Having filed the provisional patent, I have genuinely tried to REDUCE the 'signal' from my LLM vs. Human provenance discriminator. I even tried rebuilding ALL of the data collection tool-chain and using only the tiniest of lightweight linear classifiers. No matter what I do the signal persists - this is from a set of data using a different scraper, from different sites, with a different set of LLM generators, with NO prompts (just responding to the sample text).. But the signal remains...
#research #patents #ai #llm #human

Nikolai Hampton 💾Apr 4

Academic writing is a different kind of tired.

You have to hold a mental picture of the forest, the trees, and the veins on a single leaf. SIMULTANEOUSLY! (and justify each one to a standard that survives review)..

Then rinse and repeat across days.

You finish a session and you can’t read a text message because you’ve been contextswitching between altitude levels for 13 hours straight and your working memory is just gone.

People don’t see that. They see someone sitting at a desk.
The thinking is the labour and it is relentless.

I say this as someone with 20+ years of commercial and industry experience before I went into academia.

#academics #exhausted #research #patents

Front Page Apr 2

The surprisingly genius design of common zippers and why so many have ‘YKK’ on the pull tab

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/surprisingly-dramatic-history-of-zippers/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=surprisingly-dramatic-history-of-zippers

Liam @ GamingOnLinux Apr 2

The US Patent Office have rejected a Nintendo Pokemon patent for summoning subcharacters #Nintendo #Pokemon #Patents

The US Patent Office have reje...

The US Patent Office have rejected a Nintendo Pokemon patent for summoning subcharacters

While it likely won't affect the ongoing Japan lawsuit between Nintendo / Pokemon and Pocketpair / Palworld, it is at least good news for game devs elsewhere.

GamingOnLinux

Liam @ GamingOnLinux 🐧🎮Apr 2

The US Patent Office have rejected a Nintendo Pokemon patent for summoning subcharacters https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/04/the-us-patent-office-have-rejected-a-nintendo-pokemon-patent-for-summoning-subcharacters/

#Nintendo #Pokemon #Patents

The US Patent Office have rejected a Nintendo Pokemon patent for summoning subcharacters

While it likely won't affect the ongoing Japan lawsuit between Nintendo / Pokemon and Pocketpair / Palworld, it is at least good news for game devs elsewhere.

GamingOnLinux

J. Matt Buchanan Apr 1

The theme for our local photo club's April contest is food photography. I have zero experience with that, but I've had this idea for an old patent marking plate kicking around in my head for years. So I went to the grocery store, grabbed the biggest orange I could find, and literally screwed the plate into the peel.

That counts, right?

#photography #patents #foodphotography