Room Escape Artist

We’re trying something new: highlighting an absolutely fantastic comment.

This comment is from J Cameron Cooper on our post ULTIMATE MOBILE ESCAPE ROOMS: Patent Troll?

In the post we look into one company’s claim that they have filed a patent for mobile escape games and examine the legitimacy of such a move.

J Cameron Cooper added:

“Prior to patent issuance, a third party (“3rd party”) can anonymously (1) submit prior art in the form of a preissuance submission, (2) file a protest of an application, or (3) request a public use proceeding.”

While whatever claims one is likely to make in such an application are likely laughable, the Patent Office is in a pretty laughable state and has approved stupider things. Anyone with an interest in this should look carefully at a Preissuance Third Party Submission (37 C.F.R. § 1.290) to inform the examiner of prior art. Even that should be done carefully, however.

I have searched published US pending applications and there is no such thing among them. You can go directly to the USPTO (https://www.uspto.gov/), but https://patents.google.com/ is pretty handy. Since it isn’t yet published, anyone interested should set up an alert.

It’s not particularly my business, but I’ve set up an alert for this one just because I hate patent trolls.

Oh, and if anyone else is interested, “Die Hard” is a 20th Century Fox property, “Twilight Zone” appears to be CBS, and “Da Vinci Code” is Dan Brown. Large properties don’t seem to care much for enforcing their rights against escape rooms (I think they’re too small) but perhaps one of them would like to hear of this company.

This was a fantastic addition to what we wrote. Thank you, J Cameron Cooper.

In the future, we’ll continue to feature comments on our posts that spread knowledge and drive discussion.