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TECHNOLOGY
Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001 , and to the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012.

TECHNOLOGY
Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001 , and to the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012.

There were earlier pictures that have been removed now, but were easier to spot as fakes. Here is some discussion on MacNN about the "iWalk". Also note that "iWalk" is not a registered trademark of Apple.

What is an Apple trademark, though, is the "iPod" (NOTE: if you can't get the page to display, just start a new search for "iPod"). From the description, though, it does sound like a PDA...

Nice of Slashdot to finally put a story of this up... The original invitations went out last Friday!

From the Australian government patent site Searching patent information page:

"Don't reinvent the wheel. Searching worldwide patent information can help you avoid wasting time and money duplicating work done elsewhere."

The truly comic touch to this comes from IP Australian (the federal government agency which granted the patent in the first place) says...

"Don't reinvent the wheel. Searching worldwide patent information can help you avoid wasting time and money duplicating work done elsewhere"

(from here)

Vivek

an innovation patent is a relatively fast, inexpensive protection option available from IP Australia, and is the most recent in a range of other intellectual property rights . Protection lasts for a maximum of 8 years.

It seems that the patent does offer protection.

Vivek

Patent Information Users Group

IP Australia

US Patent & Trademark Office (UPSTO)

European Patent Office

for a few

This link points to the Australian patent office on line documents library, which contains a PDF about computer related inventions. The answer is broadly "Yes". Not that this is neccesarily a bad thing.

It does seem that they have actually looked into the subject a bit and decided on the sorts of things that are considered trivial and what is considered an invention rather than an abstraction.

This site lists the web pages of 19 patent agencies.

In particular, here is the Australian site (because I'm Australian), and here is the Eurpoean Union patent office (because it covers patents in all member states)

You can now trademark smells, colours, sounds, shapes, and "aspects of packaging" in Australia: See here

The siren used to signal the end of an Australian Rules football game is now a trademarked sound for example. So is the specific shade of blue used by Ansett Airlines on all their planes.

But (just to get back on topic) my understanding is that in order to trademark such things, you either need to demonstrate that the thing you're trademarking is clearly associated by the general public with your 'product' - eg the football siren is instantly recognizable to most Australians or that you've spent a lot of time and effort selecting or otherwise achieving your 'look' - Apple's extensive market research (or coca-cola's design brief for the bottle competition) would pretty clearly make it over the bar.

It'll be inetresting over the next couple of years to see what sort of cases just scrape through & what sort get dismissed as frivilous though.. : )

For those living in Australia there is a government body that can help. here the url: http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/

http://pericles. ipaustralia.gov.au/atmoss/falcon.application_start

This whole thing raises a question in my mind though. I thought Linux International was supposed to be protecting these trade marks. Why don't they just rock though all nations and just buy the trade mark now?

It would save some time later...

PS: There appears to be someone squatting on linuxinternational.net and linuxinternational.com