Context-Full Patent Art
Every now and then I see people in the comments who seem to genuinely want a better idea of what one of the posted bits of art here was supposed to be patenting. Giving that context myself doesn't seem in the spirit of the blog, but I absolutely want to encourage people to do the legwork to go sniffing around for original sources.
It's something I have to do a lot in my day job, something I've learned to enjoy, and the thing that led me to start Context-Free Patent Art a dozen years ago in the first place.
Let's start with today's post, which is a perfect example of art that raises more questions than it answers.
Almost every post on this blog has a header detailing the date of the patent or application and the number, which you can find on the top right. In this case, this image is from Patent Application # 20020022516.
Longtime Context-Free Patent Art fans might remember this image from when it was first featured here over a decade ago. I figured that a lot of the people following the blog now haven't seen some of the gems from years ago, so I'm going to be doing re-runs of some of my favorites this week. There's a bunch more I think would be good to bring back, so I'll use the vintage cfpa hashtag in the future so you know when a duplicate post is intentional (as opposed to me just forgetting I've posted a thing before, which happens a fair bit).
Back to the matter at hand though, if you're ever curious, the US Patent and Trademark Office has a super-handy patent search function. It's pretty easy to find from their main site (uspto.gov), but you can also just bookmark this link to the basic search form:
Check out the search results, click on the link for the .pdf, and you'll get the complete patent/application to peruse at your enjoyment.
In this case, you'll find the patent being applied for covers a method of "Advertising inside electronic games" and you'll learn that:
In FIG. 1, girl 10 is climbing onto a hamburger 11 like one sold at a fast food restaurant. However, in the displayed image, hamburger 11 is as large as girl 10. The person playing the game will therefore perceive hamburger 11 as fantastically large. That unusual scale will help to burnish the image of hamburger 11 in the player's memory as well as draw his attention to it while he plays the game.
Not shown in FIG. 1 are other characteristics which electronic games could apply to hamburger 11 which cannot be shown in unanimated line-drawings. Hamburger 11 will compress as girl 10 steps or pushes on it. That action will be accompanied by squishing and slurping sounds...
Yeah, the explanations are weird too, sometimes.
Sorry for all the words, I just wanted to make it as clear as possible to people that if they're ever curious about stuff they see on Context-Free Patent Art, it's usually pretty easy to find out what the deal is.
