Patent enforcement.

• Autores: Gary Stix
• Localización: Scientific American, ISSN 0036-8733, Vol. 290, Nº. 4, 2004, págs. 42-42
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The U.S. intellectual-property system has distinguished itself in the past several years for such gems as patents on privatizing government, a method for using a playground swing, and a computerized system that handles reservations for going to the toilet. But patenting the obvious is by no means confined to the land of reality shows and SUVs. In recent years, Costa Rica has given new meaning to the legal term "patent enforcement." It all has to do with the country's popular canopy tours, in which visitors strapped in a harness slide along a cable between treetop platforms. For Costa Rica, decade-old canopy tours are big business, generating a reported $120 million annually. It is estimated that a quarter of the more than a million tourists who come here every year patronize one of the 80-plus tour operations. In 1998 Darren Hreniuk, a transplanted Canadian entrepreneur, received a 20-year patent from Costa Rica's Industrial Property in Registry for an elevated forest transport system using harnesses and pulleys on a single horizontal line, using gravity for propulsion. One of the disputes surrounding the case centers on" prior art": previous technology that would undermine the claim in Hreniuk's patent application that his treetop apparatus is new and inventive, And putting this controversy to rest may be as simple as going to the Juan Santamaria Museum near the capital San Jos& eacute;, to inspect a piece of prior art that is actual art.