I’m Julie King, of King Patent and Business Law, your witchy guide to all things dark and mysterious in the world of patents, trademarks, copyright, trade secrets, confidential information, and more. You may not know it, but they are all around you, every day, almost everywhere you go. You can’t escape them.
I must warn you that this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. This is not legal advice, it doesn’t create an attorney-client relationship, and this does NOT make me your lawyer.
Last year I covered some Trademark Tales of Terror about popular horror films. This year I’ll be talking about patents ranging from cute accessories to truly bizarre inventions. I want to note that I’m not the attorney for any of these patents. I just found these by doing a search in Google patents.
I’ll start things off this year with the lighter side of Halloween-related patents. This one is suitable for kids and watching at the office or in public. We’ll get weirder and creepier in later episodes, so you have been forewarned!
Patents help you get the loot!
Trick or treating is a fun Halloween tradition for children and the adults who get to raid their candy hauls. Did you know that behind those cute or scary-looking pumpkin containers the kids carry to collect candy are often patented? Let’s look at a few.
This patent is for a pumpkin that can light up in the eyes and nose and can play sounds. This is just one of the many drawings in this patent. Patents usually have a lot of drawings in them because every part of the invention must be clearly shown in a drawing. All the parts in the drawings must be labeled, too, which is what those numbers are. The labels help the person looking at the patent connect the text description with the drawing.
This patent would have been good until 2033, but it expired in 2019 because the maintenance fees weren’t paid. I’ll talk about the life and death of patents in another episode.
This patent is for a similar invention, a candy pail shaped like a pumpkin, that lights up. This one lights up differently from the previous one, though. This one has a light at the bottom of the pail so in addition to lighting up the inside, it illuminates the sidewalk or ground and makes the child more visible to cars, enhancing the safety of trick or treating. That’s what the inventor claims is novel about this invention, anyway.
This drawing looks pretty simple, and the invention sounds pretty simple, right? Yes, but in the world of patents, even simple inventions have complicated language. This patent has thirteen separate claims. The claims are the star of the patent. They are a carefully constructed and detailed description of exactly what the patent protects about the invention, written in the highly technical language demanded by the USPTO. The greater the number of claims, the more features of the invention, or combinations of features, are being protected.
LOOK how complicated the first claim of the 13 claims is for an invention that looks so simple:
That’s all one sentence! Why? Because the USPTO says it has to be. Writing claims is like coding. Put a comma where there should be a semi-colon or period, and you’ll have to make corrections.
The language is like this because the inventor wants to make sure the invention is described thoroughly but in a way that allows some flexibility so the inventor isn’t limited to just one way of making the invention. Note that the word “pumpkin” isn’t in that sentence. That means the invention isn’t protected only when the pail looks like a pumpkin. It could also look like a robot head and still be protected.
The last candy-carrying patent we’ll look at in this episode is for treat toter on wheels.
Not everyone can carry a heavy candy collecting bucket, and sometimes it just gets tiring to haul around all that candy loot. This invention helps with that, adding a frame in which to place the container that has wheels and a handle so the container can be pushed around instead of carried around. A nice touch is the ghost on the end of the handle, which could also, according to the patent, be another kind of Halloween object, such as a pumpkin, witch, vampire, or werewolf. The inventor says the container can be in any kind of Halloween-related shape too. There’s also a lid to the container to keep candy dry in the rain. Even better, the inventor says any or all of the parts of the invention could be glow-in-the-dark! I am a huge fan of glow-in-the-dark Halloween and other spooky items, so I love this option.
What’s the Patent Treat?
The tasty patent tidbits to remember from this episode are:
- Patent drawings have to show all parts of the invention that the applicant wants to claim protection for. Being unseen works for the Invisible Man, but not for a patent application.
- Patent claims are written in a Frankenstein’s monster kind of language that is part technical writing, part legal writing, carefully crafted to make sure no parts fall on the floor and get damaged and create a monster of an application rather than producing a patent.
- This might be the best one: patents can be fun! We got to look at some cute candy carriers for trick-or-treating that have some features that are entertaining and some that solve some trick-or-treating problems.
When you’re out taking kids around trick-or-treating, or when you’re home giving out candy–because you give out candy, not healthy snacks, right? Halloween is not about being healthy. It’s about eating so much candy you worry you might slip through the thinned veil between the living and the dead. Save the apples and raisins for another day. Don’t make me hex you. Anyway, as I was saying, on Halloween this year, you’ll notice a bit more about those pumpkins and other pails full of candy, won’t you? See if you can spot things about them that might be innovative enough to get a patent. Maybe they already have. There are many patents for Halloween treat carriers – you can find more on Google patents or in the USPTO’s patent database.
Next time we’ll get a little more creepy, and l’ll talk about some patents for Halloween costumes, ranging from the cute to the blood-soaked. Make sure to come back for GORE.
My contact information is in my bio, so please don’t hesitate to reach out and connect or ask questions.
Thank you for watching!
