A patent application, once filed, is kept confidential for 18 months by the US Patent & Trademark Office, which then publishes the app as a publicly available document ( Read more... )

Patent applications can be thought of as arguments: essentially, they argue that a patent should be issued for an applicant's invention. As a result, even though patent apps are dull chunks of technical writing, they're usually written in an extremely passively argumentative style ( Read more... )

More than 7 million things have been patented in the US. Here's one:


( Read more... )