April 16th, 2008

Swag "Shocker" in violation of United States Patent #D495749S?

Published at 5:02 AM PST

Interesting article we found after reading about Kotaku's swag score was about the giant foam "Shocker" being a United States Patent violation. Confused? Well the story goes that the blog writer, Ricky Van Veen, invented the giant foam shocker hand in 2004 and got a legitimate US Patent for it. Which in itself is quiet surprising, anyway this basically means that in creating a foam hand of their own for the swag Kotaku and many webmasters received they are in violation of the United States Patent #D495749S.

However Ricky is one of the high-ranking staff members of CollegeHumor.com, and Rockstar just happen to be one of their largest advertising clients. So he's not that worried really, he doesn't plan on taking it to court or anything like that. However his final sentence in his blog entry sums it up really:

Though I must admit a high drama court case over “the shocker” would be a funny thing to see.

Source; Ricky!