New patent granted for building a “snow man/woman” | Hacker News Reader

New patent granted for building a “snow man/woman”

improbable.com

29 pointsrizumu8 comments

To be fair, the article is inaccurate.

The patent describes a component (in this case, a sphere of some material that grabs snow around it) being used in the construction of a snowman. Thus, the snowman/woman is not the creation here.

So many 'zomg stupid patent' articles are like this. It's like they read "Method and system for transferring information over copper wires" and think "how can these guys expect to patent any and every conceivable system for transferring information over copper?" And then write an inflammatory blog post about it, without actually reading specific claims, which might be genuinely innovative.

Of course there are plenty of patents which are silly, but framing things like this as "someone's patented building snowmen" does a lot of damage to the larger debate, imho.

To be clear, the patent owner also holds a patent on the wheel: http://www.ipmenu.com/archive/AUI_2001100012.pdf

The first page of the document explains it all, however:

Innovation patents are a new type of patent available only in Australia. [...] Innovation patents are granted without examination, usually within 1 to 3 months, whereas standard patents are examined only after paying the examination fee, and usually take 2 to 4 years. After an innovation patent has been granted, the owner or any person may request examination, and such examination must occur before the owner can commerce or threaten to commence infringement proceedings.

So basically you could submit anything you want as an invention patent. The paper is more or less worthless as long as you don't get it examined.

Agreed. The title of the article is inaccurate.

The patent not only provides methods for creating a spherically-shaped body that provides an interior structure of the snow man/woman, but also describes how a generator can provide a sufficient electric charge to attract and adhere snow to the outer surface.

The unfortunate part is all the prior art melted.

A patent to snowman was filed by Angela Holiday in 2006. Number 7,963,500. Apparently granted in June 2011.

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