A Utility Patent For What?

The title of Professors Sarah R. Wasserman Rajec and Andrew Gilden’s article in progress is “Patenting Pleasure.” A recent draft discusses the pass that certain patents get from the otherwise strict dictum that patentees must state plainly what their patents are for. When the applications are for sex toys, a certain level of decorum is preserved by tiptoeing around the plain truth. In Dennis Crouch’s article in Patently-O, he quickly reviews the level of obfuscation allowed in various fields of endeavor, much of which is directed at straddling the tight-line between the disclosure requirement and keeping trade secrets, or attempting to beat the PTO’s AI system that routes patent applications to the various art units. In the case of sex toys there’s another dynamic at work and it makes for some murky prose. Rajec and Gilden do not include any X-rated drawings in their article, so according to Crouch it “should be safe for reading on the train.”