5 of the strangest patents owned by tech brands

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Tech companies love to brag about their near-infinite research budgets, promising us a future filled with quantum computers, foldable screens, and all the gadgets we’re supposed to use tomorrow. To lock in these ideas, companies file thousands of patents every year. You would probably expect these legal documents to cover things like the sophisticated algorithms and advanced microchips that will power the next generation of smartphones. However, if you dig deep into the archives of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, you’ll find many filings that are downright confusing.

The biggest and most recognizable tech brands on the planet have managed to patent painfully banal concepts or downright terrifying dystopian ideas. These filings often leave industry observers perplexed or deeply disturbed, wondering how these concepts escaped the supposedly strict intellectual property (IP) review process. This highlights a strange reality of the tech industry: mega-corporations will rush to legally claim ownership of virtually everything under the sun. And according to these patents, sometimes it’s just a microscopic modification of an idea that’s already been around for years.

A closer look at these bizarre patents reveals an extremely entertaining (if somewhat questionable) side to the world of consumer electronics. From a simple paper bag to a nightmarish advertising concept, here are five of the strangest patents ever owned by tech brands.

When you think of products designed in Cupertino, Apple’s wireless headphones and sleek laptops immediately come to mind. And when you buy these products at an Apple Store, you’re probably only thinking about the things you do outside the store, not where you do them. However, in 2016, the tech giant officially filed a patent application for a paper bag. The document details a specific container made from white solid bleached sulfate paper with at least 60% post-consumer recycled content.

The reason behind this surprisingly boring patent actually comes from the fact that the company encourages big environmental initiatives. To honor this, while creating a bag that matches the premium shopping experience the company tries to offer its customers, Apple had its engineering team create special reinforcement inserts that reinforce the structural integrity of the bag. It was an incredibly sophisticated solution to an everyday retail problem, complete with complex diagrams that look exactly like the ordinary bags handed out in any department store.

Sure, it’s easy to mock a multibillion-dollar company patenting folded paper, but the move highlights Apple’s fierce commitment to controlling its public image. Protecting a bag’s structural design prevents competing retailers from exactly imitating that premium carrying experience, proving that tech giants are obsessed with (and trying to own) every little detail.

Scroll through Amazon’s many products and one visual element remains completely consistent: isolated products placed on a perfectly homogeneous white background. This clean visual style makes it easy to visualize a product and has been a cornerstone of commercial photography for decades, widely used since before the Internet even existed. Amazingly, the world’s largest online retailer has managed to secure a patent for this precise and incredibly common studio layout. The legal filing essentially claimed complete ownership of the specific process of capturing subjects against a well-lit background.

The approved patent application reads like a tutorial for a high school photography class. It describes the positioning of a subject on a cyclorama, as well as details of the configuration of other elements, such as lighting. Amazon managed to convince the patent office that this was a unique and sufficiently proprietary invention and not a universally practiced photographic technique. It’s the equivalent of trying to patent a basic sandwich by specifying the exact ratio of ingredients.

Naturally, this extremely bold intellectual property claim sparked intense outrage within the professional photography community. The repository served primarily as a bizarre defensive measure and remains a silly, even questionable, footnote in tech history.

Before leaving for a tropical vacation or a very long holiday weekend, almost every office worker on the planet sets up an auto-reply message indicating that they are out of the office. This is an informational element built into all major email platforms on the Internet at this point. But despite the concept being ubiquitous for a long time, multinational IT giant IBM decided it needed to obtain a patent for an “out-of-office email system,” and in early 2017, it finally did so. The application was initially filed in 2010, well after automated responses had already become a business staple.

The baffling approval of this equally baffling patent drew immediate and harsh criticism from digital rights advocates on the web. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have pointed out that granting legal ownership of such a mundane, everyday concept is complete “nonsense.” The very principle of the intellectual property system is that an invention is both novel and non-obvious, and automatic holiday responses clearly fail on both counts. Critics have argued that allowing a large company to own this basic software function could lead to disastrous legal battles throughout the software industry.

IBM has also faced widespread public backlash and endless internet shaming, as it did when it attempted to replace its workforce with AI. But ultimately, IBM decided to do the right thing and not assert the patent. Now anyone can be put “out of office” without fear of being sued by Big Blue.

Almost everyone hates commercials, and we all strive to turn off the remote or ignore anything that interrupts our favorite TV shows. In 2012, Sony actively attempted to take advantage of this universal inconvenience by obtaining a patent officially titled “System for converting television advertisements into interactive network video games.” While this may sound fun in theory, the actual details listed in the patent filing were actually an advertising nightmare that would require viewers to verbally interact with the ads.

The most insane part of this video, hidden in the patent’s illustrations, shows a viewer lying on their couch as a fast-food commercial begins to play. To end the ad, the viewer literally has to shout the brand name directly at their television. According to the document, the system would use a camera and microphone to verify that viewers actively participated in the company’s singing before allowing their show to resume.

It’s a concept that seems straight out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, effectively holding your favorite TV shows hostage until you comply with what feels like some sort of brand loyalty test. Fortunately, Sony has never actually incorporated this nightmare fuel into any of its TV models. Although the patent is active and doesn’t expire until 2030, we hope Sony leaves it behind as a slightly terrifying piece of intellectual property history. Maybe we’d all be better off just checking out a stack of books from the library.

While Sony’s patent was ridiculous, Microsoft’s seems morally outrageous. Losing a loved one is a universally tragic experience, but Microsoft decided to explore whether artificial intelligence could somehow ease that shock. In late 2020, Microsoft was granted a patent describing a way to create a conversational chatbot modeled after a specific person. While the creation of digital avatars isn’t entirely new, the patent language explicitly states that the subject could be a “past or present” entity, opening the door to literal digital necromancy.

The technical framework proposed in the filing documents involved retrieving large amounts of personal data to train the AI ​​model. By analyzing a deceased person’s social media posts, private emails, texts, voice recordings and photos, the system could then theoretically generate a chatbot that exactly mimics their personality and speaking style. It effectively promised a future in which grieving loved ones could simply open an app and continue to have conversations with digital ghosts.

Unsurprisingly, the public reaction to this idea was a mixture of abject horror and ethical outrage. Critics were quick to point out the huge consent issues involved in digitally resurrecting someone who never agreed to the process. Following this backlash, Microsoft executives publicly admitted that the concept was “disturbing” and promised that they had no active plans to develop this terrifying product.