SWEEPING liberalisation of the US patent laws is having some unexpected effects. Anyone with several hundred dollars spare to pay in official filing fees to the US Patent Office in Alexandria, Virginia, can now file for patent on more or less anything, it seems. Thus Colleen Giles and La’Mont Carmen of Columbus, Ohio, have applied for a patent on an idea which may well look new to the official examiners simply because no one else has had the chutzpah to file for it (US 2005/0057034).
Their Consensual Sex Agreement Kit is intended “to allow willing participants of a sexual encounter to contractually agree to certain terms before a sexual relationship”. So there is “a contractual understanding of the sexual relationship before and after the encounter” and “parties engaged in a sexual encounter may do so without the worry of unspoken debt”.
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The kit includes a book which lays down the rules of encounter, a contract to sign with “notice of satisfactory completion” and an ID card to stop people impersonating others.
It is far from clear how anyone could be caught infringing such a patent, or indeed how this could be proved in court. Interesting, though, to find the US government charging fees to grant a patent that helps people to trade in sex.
“WE are pleased to announce that Robert Avakian, who frequently drives past a sign on the Oklahoma turnpikes announcing “Failure to Pay Toll Strictly Enforced”, has yet to be arrested for paying a toll”
And the cow shall lie down with the wolf
IN PARTS of the American Southwest, meanwhile, cattle ranchers kill wolves with traps, poison and aerial shoot-ins. Nearby, environmentalists want to reintroduce wolves to balance local ecologies.
Could wolf-friendly beef resolve the dispute? Some ranchers are prepared to raise their stock in wolf country without resorting to lupine slaughter. But that means keeping herds tightly clustered and frightening wolves off by banging pans together. Unsurprisingly, most ranchers are far from keen on the idea.
As Toby Moore points out in his novel Sleeping with the Fishes, while you give yourself a pat on the back for buying dolphin-friendly tuna, you are still eating tuna – or, now, beef. All the same, Feedback senses a business opportunity here. If you can patent a consensual sex agreement kit, there shouldn’t be a problem capturing the intellectual rights to wolf-friendly beef.
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!
YORKSHIRE crafts and craftspeople are the subject of some fine photos taken by David Morgan Rees in this part of northern England during the 1970s – and the framed originals “are kept in an archive at Sheffield Hallam University Psalter Lane Learing Centre” it says at . David Wilman, who noticed this, wonders whether spelling is now a postgraduate subject at the university. Finding that the Royal Shakespeare Company appeared first in our search for “Learing”, Feedback had high hopes of classes taught on a stormy heath by a maddened king declaiming “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” Sadly, it seems to be a typo, since corrected.
SAVINGS bank ING Direct is keen to attract the widest possible range of customers. When Nicola Theobald tried to sign on for an online savings account, the options she was presented with when asked to indicate her sex were “male”, “female” or “unknown”.
IT SEEMS such a waste to throw away a battery because a digital camera cannot draw enough power to light up the LCD screen, when you know there is still some juice left in it to do…something. A UK company, SnailAway, reckons it has found that use: most discarded batteries can still give a snail or slug a small shock. Connect one to a closely spaced pair of bare wires, and any slug or snail crossing the electric fence will bridge the gap with its wet slimy body, feel the volts and turn tail.
You are spared the guilt of waste, the plants are spared slugs, and hedgehogs are spared lethal slug-poison.
FINALLY, here’s an email from Philip Nye in his Toronto hotel room, where he has just connected his laptop to a high-speed internet access point. First he had to agree to the terms and conditions of the service, run by Bell Canada. As someone concerned about privacy, Nye actually read them, and found this: “Privacy. For information on how user information is collected, used and disclosed by Bell please consult our Privacy and Security Policy at .”
So to find out what he was agreeing to in this subsection of the heretofore mentioned terms and conditions, he had first to agree to it. Reluctantly, he did. And then he pasted that URL for the privacy policy into his browser, and got “You have asked for a page that does not exist on our site…the page or file you are looking for may have been moved or retired”. When Feedback tried this we had to jump through geeky hoops even to see that message.
So Bell Canada’s privacy policy is now private, even after you’ve agreed to it…
