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McDonalds Files To Patent Making a Sandwich
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "McDonalds has applied for patent WO2006068865, which carries the title 'METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MAKING A SANDWICH.' John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, can eat his heart out (unless that's been patented, too). Undoubtedly, some people are contemplating whether there's anything novel in this patent that is somehow obscured by its generic title. Feel free to examine their flowchart for yourself and see exactly how novel their sandwich 'subroutines' are. The good news is that, given that it only mentions generic sandwich making 'tool(s),' rather than any specific machine, it might not survive after the In Re Bilski decision, which was meant to put a stop to absurdities such as this. But until McDonalds's application is rejected or invalidated, make sure you don't use their flowchart when making sandwiches. After all, if you 'apply appropriate condiments to appropriate compartment,' you might infringe upon their IP."
if you 'apply appropriate condiments to appropriate compartment
Thank god all of my condiments are inappropriate.
A lot of my compartments as well for that matter
I can has cheezburger patent?
I was just stacking bread without asking myself the tough questions like McDonalds did. My paper hat is off to them.
The flowchart is irrelevant; the question is what do the CLAIMS say. Here, the claims are directed to bringing separate refrigerated sandwich makings up to temperature in very short order. Take a look, for example, at claim 1:
A method of filling an order for a sandwich comprising: toasting a bread component for the sandwich for less than about 1 minute in response to the order in a first heating device; and initiating and completing the heating of a sandwich filling for the sandwich from about 4OF or less to about 120F or more in a second heating device, while the bread component is heating, in response to the order.
Now, I CAN do that with my toaster & my microwave. But we don't need to resort to hyperbole to do that, do we?
Moreover, this is a PCT application, based on US application 11/018,989. The US application has been abandoned, for failure to respond to the most basic of office actions.
And seriously, is this news-worthy? If /. wants to publish EVERY bad patent application, it's going to get crowded here pretty quick. There's a lot of chaff out there.
...and this patent was filed three years ago and published two years ago. Oh wait, the article in the Guardian was published two years ago too. Did I accidentally get so bored as to click "yesterday" over seven hundred times... or is it a slow news day? :-)
im in ur patent office
approvin teh obveeyus
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Until they ask for a bailout citing "home cooking is killing the restraunt industry"
Make SELinux enforcing again!
Methods are statutory subject matter, which means they're patentable in principle, as long as they result in a physical change. They don't even necessarily have to involve a tool at all. Those claims are perfectly valid (though maybe not patentable due to prior art). Business methods aren't necessarily patentable, because they're generally mental processes. The difference seems to be confusing a lot of people.
The broken link was meant to go here. I have no idea why Slashdot changed it from the original you can find in my submission. Perhaps they intended to link to a past Slashdot story? Oh well.
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
My mistakes are due to knowing more about what patents ought to be than what they are. One need not understand every bit of law to know when its effects are harmful, after all.
Anyhow, I seriously question any claim that there's something 'novel' about this method of making a sandwich. I think lots of people are able to do something else while waiting for something else (like a microwave) to finish cooking. And any time you do something more than once, it's simple enough to break it down into sub-tasks and do each of those before moving on. Lastly, serving the oldest burger first is pretty much exactly as expected.
While you're right that this isn't a purely mental process, it's a rather menial one. Yes, there's a little bit of information buried in there about what "tools" the sandwich maker uses. But lacking very much information about that, even what little is in the claims is pretty damn useless.
So yes, my purpose was mostly to let people laugh at a silly patent. My 'crusade' as you call it, though, is merely to get people to change weird and arbitrary laws to sensible, enforceable ones that respect the Constitutional directive to 'promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts'. I'm too well aware of the fact that it's easier said than done, but it's pretty obvious that some things aren't working.
I did realize that the patent hadn't issued yet. It's the 'rejected' part of 'rejected or invalidated' because the two aren't the same thing. For picking over everything I might or might not realize so carefully, how did you miss that? I guess I'm not the only one whose brain can do short-circuit evaluation of an 'or' clause.
[Pedants, please note that I know that you are only permitted to skip evaluation of the second half if the first half is true. Even so, I am referring back to his complaint that I ignored half of the machine-or-transformation test.]
Also, I do actually know that the claims are more important than the title, it's just that the flowchart is much more comprehensible than the text of the patent. Normal people, who might in theory want to make use of this patent when it expires, have a hard enough time understanding technology of any sort to begin with. You add legalese to that and the patent becomes worthless as a description of anything. Even though it's supposed to help those "skilled in the art" to duplicate the invention (which art? law??).
Patents as they exist now are a profit center for patent lawyers and a business expense for industry. No one I have ever known derives useful information for them (even though we have patents to get people to disclose their inventions...) and even if they wanted to, they'd be liable for triple damages for willful infringement if they were found to have read someone's patent before it expired.
So maybe we should be reversing this line of questioning. What good are patents? They create a huge legal expense. Why are they worth that?
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property