This project (and thousands of others like it) have just recently been made possible by three things.
1) Small, high powered brushless motors reaching hobbyist level prices because of neodymium magnets and manufacturing techniques.
2) Control circuits becoming possible at this level as well thanks to the microcontrollers and sensors reaching the market that brought us things like arduino. (10 years ago a micro with 256k of onboard flash and a 3 axis gyro was the size of ham sandwich and cost as much as your car)
3) Cheap but very high power density lithium polymer batteries becoming available.
We're now at the point where we can make just about any little toy fly by festooning it with little propellers. So you can head down to the patent office every time you think of a new place to stick one. It will seem novel because even a few years ago, the "real" technologies that provided you with those little propellers didn't exist.
This toy is still as cool as all get-out. I just think he's wasting time if he goes any further than "pending" before he gets millions of $ in sales.
genuine newbie question: is it true? 10 years ago they wire still so big and expensive?
The real killer has been rapid update rate inertial measurement units (IMUs) which refresh rapidly enough to make interesting feedback loops practical. Small and fast IMUs have arisen out of the the development of MEMS (or Micro Electro Mechanical Systems). Integrating the accelerometer and signal conditioning is the thing that really kicked things off. Putting them into phones got the volumes to the point where they are very inexpensive.
The idea is certainly novel as far as I know, though.
Working in software just has me take a big gulp when I read the section about a patent here.