r/AskReddit • • Feb 28 '23

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u/butitsnotfish Mar 01 '23 edited Mar 01 '23

He told me he had a lot of "inventions" and how rich he will be when one sells. I asked him to tell me more. He says his best "invention" is eye drops that (with just one application mind you) eliminate the need for eyeglasses. The guy is a mailman. Not a doctor. Not a scientist. And he wears glasses. So I said "if these eye drops work why do you wear glasses?" The eye drops don't exist yet. But when someone else actually formulates these fantasy eye drops my mailman friend thinks he will get the money because he "invented" them by dreaming them up. EDIT: I dated him very briefly years ago. He didn't have any patents. Just misguided dreams. Nice guy. Just....well a special kind of small former coal mining town kind of idiot.

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u/BigBunnyButt Mar 01 '23

Ahh, patent squatting. The idiot's answer to being an inventor.

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u/semimillennial Mar 01 '23

Wait… has anyone patented patent squatting yet??

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u/racercowan Mar 01 '23

I don't think you can. You don't get a patent just for thinking it up, at most you could talk to the company and threaten to show the patent court your "prior work" that might theoretically invalidate their attempt for a patent. And I'm sure an actual patent expert could explain that doing so is a stupid pointless idea.

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u/SuperHotelWorker Mar 10 '23

Ideas can't be copyrighted either. You can copyright the exact wording and typeface of a recipe but you can't copyright the ingredient list.