An ‘every player wins a prize’ approach to Australian patent law enabled Jack Vaisman to claim official endorsement for his sex therapy. Kelly Burke and Kate McClymont investigate.
A month after John Keogh applied in 2001 for an Australian Innovation Patent for his “circular transportation device”, the Australian government granted him a patent for the wheel. The prank earned Australia’s patent-granting agency international derision and Keogh, a patent lawyer, was awarded Harvard University’s IgNobel Prize for Technology.
The patent, of course, was unenforceable. Keogh had lodged his application merely to draw attention to some of the more glaring inadequacies in Australian patent law, where any member of the public may lodge an innovation patent application online, pay a fee and have
the application rubber stamped within a matter of a few weeks, no questions asked. It made people laugh but did nothing to reform Australian innovation patent law.“A lot of people just file [applications] so they can say they’ve got a patent,” says Michael Caine, a partner in the Melbourne patent law firm, Davies Collison Cave. “We’ve got all these innovation patents just sitting there, not subject to any examination. It’s an automated system which in a way relies on peoples’ ignorance.”
No one has prospered more from exploiting the flaccid system than Jack Vaisman, the man behind the Advanced Medical Institute and its ubiquitous advertising campaigns promising men longer-lasting sex.
So says a May 23, 2009 Sydney Morning Herald report.