Banana holder, obvious=silly?

The other silly patent I'd like to talk about is the Banana Protective Device patent. While this patent is useful in terms of storing banana, and the ease of use in some ways. It is rather an obvious apparatus to anyone who has ever eaten a banana before. This makes a strong case of ensuring that the importance of the non-obviousness requirement.

I've seen this kind of banana holder being sold in a lot of shops. Clearly, it has drew some market interest. Though I am not sure if this could possibly be an argument to defend against non-obviousness validation in terms of proven market/commercial success. Personally I wouldn't agree this apparatus is patentable because it is immediately obvious to me.

Anti-Eating Face Mask

This past week we talked about silly patents. To me it's like putting humor in serious patent documents. We envision any patent should be somewhat useful if not revolutionary. However, there still exists patents that are considered too obvious or useless at the time of writing.

Let's look at this Anti-Eating Face Mask patent, which it obviously tries to prevent a user from eating anything effectively.

The above diagram shows a mask that is hooked to a person's entire head, with a small lock hanging on the side of the face. There are several patents that were referred as prior art in this patent document:

• Safety or restraining device
• Mouth-guard for children and infants
• Anti-mouth-breathing device
• Face guard for infants
• Arm purse and hand purse
• Apparatus for controlling eating and smoking habits

Briefly browsing over the above prior art, I feel they all qualified to fall into the silly patents. The usefulness is left to be proven.

Rectangular design patent

Another well-known example for non-obviousness is the design shape of rectangles with rounded corners. This would be an even simpler example than the slide-to-unlock case. In this article from Foss patents, Apple claimed four major elements were copied by Samsung. The first element is described as "a flat, clear, black-colored, rectangular front surface with four evenly rounded corners". Sure, I'd agree this is a major component in Apple's design of a smartphone. But it shouldn't be treated as if Apple created the idea of having rectangular surface with rounded corners, resulting in Samsung stealing the idea.

Though rectangular rounded corners weren't the only element Apple claimed Samsung infringed on, the rest of the pieces were still very closely related to the detail of the rectangle shaped design. I would say arguing the obviousness of rectangular rounded corners would still make its case in the court if Apple wants to sue every smartphone manufacturer in the world who've made any rectangular rounded corner phone.

Maybe it's time for all the smartphone engineers to design a phone with sharp corners.

2014-04-27 updated with video

Slide-to-unlock, not obvious?

Back in 2011 August, a preliminary injunction was granted by a Dutch court against some products by Samsung. An interesting piece of information regarding obviousness of Apple's patent appeared in the case.

Apple claimed a patent with its well known "slide to unlock" screen, which specifies an unlock icon will slide with the gesture . Apple was suing HTC and Motorola over this patent in different courts. Then the Dutch judge decided that the slide-to-unlock patent is obvious, as a result rending the patent invalid.

Samsung provided further information proving the obviousness of the patent. Just not long before Apple filed slide-to-unlock patent, a small Swedish mobile manufacturer Neonode released a smartphone running Windows CE, with slide-to-unlock functionality. The only difference is this Windows CE phone doesn't have the unlock icon but everything else the same.

I personally don't think this patent is proving any novelty simply because it is too obvious to try. Neonode already thought of such way to unlock a device. Thus making a strong case for invalidating the patent. This would be a very good simple example to understand non-obviousness requirement, and why is it an important requirement for a patent.

2014/04/27 updated with video