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.
I see many issues with this patent, the least of which is the anti-eating component. It would be incredibly difficult to speak or breathe with such a restrictive apparatus on the face. Also, I don't know anyone who would wear this kind of device to control their eating habits. Diet is a very sensitive and personal topic; wearing such a device would essentially let everyone in the vicinity of the wearer know that the wearer has an over-eating problem. Lastly, I think this patent could be considered obvious by the TSM method. One of the patents this patent cites as prior art is an "apparatus for controlling eating and smoking habits"--I think there's a reasonable suggestion in that patent that could lead someone to take the next step from controlling eating to preventing it completely.
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