Patent Monkeys vs. Patent Trolls

The idea behind patents is that you get exclusive use of the technology you developed for a few years, so that you’re able to recoup the money you spent on research and development. Patent trolls are people who don’t actually invent things, they just buy patents and sit on them, or come up with partial ideas, then squat on them until someone happens to use them in an actual product. Then the trolls sue them. It’s a big enough problem that it’s quantifiably slowing down American innovation.

Enter: “Patent Monkeys.” You’ve heard that if you put a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters, they would eventually bang out the complete works of Shakespeare. (Or, thirty monkeys and two weeks could reproduce most of Fifty Shades of Grey.) Alexander Reben used this concept to develop an algorithm which spits out 36,000 new ideas per minute, including gems like “fuel-injected baby diaper.” I don’t know what exactly a fuel-inject baby diaper would do, but if some intrepid parent happens to develop it and get sued by a patent troll, our faithful Patent Monkey has preempted their lawsuit.

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