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Show HN: Retro Patents – Tech patents turned into art
- watsonc73 9y agoHappy Friday! I'm the co-founder of Retro Patents and we're super proud to bring the site to the HN community. Last year, we were travelling in Europe and we came across a boutique print shop that had a Harley Davidson motorcycle patent in the window. We really liked the minimalist look to it and remembered how we'd used early product prototypes for motivation in the past. There's nothing more inspiring than seeing a world beating product stripped down to its core. So we started the website you see today to help inspire others to go out and create magic. The prints also look really good as wall art ;) There's a 15% discount for the HN community if you use the code (HACKER). P.s. Max Levchin (PayPal founder) bought his own print and shared it on Twitter earlier this week - it was a great moment !
- PatentTroll 9y agoWhy not the "classics" like the Edsison light bulb or the Wright flyer patent? I consider the old ones to be beautiful
- watsonc73 9y agoWe're also fans of some of the classic inventions but we have a preference for modern products that still inspire. They're more relatable and it's cool when the actual patent authors are still alive as it makes the product's growth all the more impressive.
- jaclaz 9y ago+1, the idea in itself is nice, maybe - ideally - you could make some sort of "public" submission form ending up in a list , and then make into production the most voted/asked for, and - say - send a free print to the person submitting the most voted one weekly or monthly. BTW, and as a side note, not all Patent images are reproducible free of charge, so the above list might need to have an additional field for it being public domain or otherwise, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_US_patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_US_patent... Another thing, I concur with the people that see the large print of the whatever commercial name as being a spoiler of some sort, the original title might be better, as an example the "Gameboy" patent title is(was): http://www.google.com/patents/US5184830 http://www.google.com/patents/US5184830 "Compact hand-held video game system" and the iPhone is "Electronic device": https://www.google.com/patents/USD615083S1 https://www.google.com/patents/USD615083S1 which sound (at least to me) a lot better. Just as an idea, you could then have the "Gameboy" printed on the back and an extract of the patent text, like the "Field of Invention" or however the summary. Just for your information, there is something wrong in the iPhone one, is it May 4,2010 or June 5, 2008? (i.e. publishing date vs. filing date) And the patent number is either USD615083 S1 or US D615083 S1, not just S.
- aurora- 9y agoThese look awesome - I just ordered the Google PageRank patent! I literally want to hang every one of these in the office. My second favourite has to be the Microchip patent filed by Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor. A close third would be the IBM patent filed by Arthur Dickinson. Really great job with these overall - I'll be ordering some more for birthday presents
- watsonc73 9y agoglad you like them and good choice :)
- mysterydip 9y agoThese are great, and something I had wanted to do for my office but didn't get around to yet. May I suggest some actual game patents in your games section along with the hardware? I don't recall which game off the top of my head, but I've seen some that resemble the gmail/pagerank ones with a sample outlined screenshot or flowchart.
- watsonc73 9y agoGreat idea - we'll look into this, thanks!
- tgb 9y agoI'd buy one of the Selectric typewriter for my dad if it were available!
- watsonc73 9y agoThere's a contact us section on the site where we collect all patent requests - please feel free to submit some!
- cubano 9y agoVery smart idea..and nice execution. Great job. What techie wouldn't love one (or four as a nice matrix) of these?
- watsonc73 9y agoThanking you kindly!
- tbirdz 9y agoAs far as I am aware Patent Documents are public domain, and not subject to copyright, so if someone wanted a printed patent poster they could grab the document and take it to any large format printer and have it printed there cheaper than it would cost to order from retropatents.com, and they could do this for any patent they were interested in, not just the limited selection available at your store. Does Retro Patents add anything unique? Or in other words, why should I order from Retro Patents instead of doing what I mentioned in the first paragraph?
- watsonc73 9y agoYou're right but we have spent a lot of time cleaning and tidying up the designs and formatting the final piece of art. I'd also add that our final product is of the highest quality and most local print shops couldn't give you the same service. Saying that there is an original patents page on the site for this purpose. We're happy if you're hanging patent art either way :)
- tyingq 9y agoWhat, exactly, would you print? The whole patent? A drawing or diagram? Which one(s)? Without the context of a title and subtext?
- GuiA 9y agoOur society encourages most people to be lazy & unimaginative, who then would rather pay a bit more money to get something readymade than go through all the steps you outlined. Same reason why all those recurring subscription cooking ingredient boxes are so popular. This is wonderful, because if it weren't the case it'd be much harder to start a business. So congrats to the founders of that website on capturing money by firing up Photoshop and copy pasting some patent diagrams.
- chrisfosterelli 9y agoDo you drive all the way to the farm to get your groceries? Or do you get them at a grocery store? Convenience adds value.
- fascinated 9y agoLooking forward to some Lodsys or Intellectual Ventures pieces, patents are great
- dickfickling 9y agoI opened this page in a new tab along with a few other articles I meant to read. After a few seconds, the page title started flashing "Don't forget this" at me. Is this a new way to avoid tab abandonment? I'm not normally one of those people who immediately closes a page that annoys me, but holy shit that was jarring. https://www.dropbox.com/s/a4i3yhsg9jpobhj/Screenshot%202017-05-26%2010.15.30.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/a4i3yhsg9jpobhj/Screenshot%202017-...
- Flammy 9y agoI thought it was clever. Hadn't seen it done before but I'm sure they weren't the first. I definitely agree this will get annoying very quickly if this catches on. I also hadn't seen the "Someone from $location recently ordered #item" as a popup. Interesting twist on social validation. Saw it on this page https://www.retropatents.com/collections/all https://www.retropatents.com/collections/all
- habosa 9y agoI'd love these with one change: drop the text at the bottom! It would be so much more fun to just have the schematic and make my guests have to guess what the patent is for. More of a conversation piece that way.
- freshyill 9y agoCompletely agreed. The schematics look great, and the text totally throws it off as an art piece.
- watsonc73 9y agoThanks for the feedback. We actually split test this at the very start and the name variant won out. Seems like the majority of customers have a loyalty to the brand/product and preferred having the name. I guess art is subjective and I can understand why you'd prefer it the other way. Cheers for the comments anyway!
- gatesphere 9y agoSo, maybe offer both styles?
- petepete 9y agoThis is my general reaction almost all t-shirts I see for sale.
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- kingbirdy 9y agoI've seen a lot of similar "patents as art" sites - anything that sets you apart?
- watsonc73 9y agoAFAIK we're the first to focus on the startup world. As flagged in the intro, we took our inspiration from a print of a motorcycle but wanted to flesh out the idea in the tech and gaming world which we love. We've also filed patents ourselves so know the space pretty well.
- it__guy 9y agoLove the minimalist look. Suggestion: Perhaps you could add a section for fictional patents from sci-fi universes - Warp Drive from Star Trek - Proton pack from Ghostbusters - Memory erasing device from MiB - Iron Man's arc reactor - Batmobile
- watsonc73 9y agoAwesome suggestion! Sounds like a fun summer project.
- iplaw 9y agoTwo things - 1) I highly recommend Intentio, http://www.intentioipi.com http://www.intentioipi.com, if you decide to pursue creation of patent drawings for fictional devices. 2) Be careful you don't tread on copyrights and/or trademarks.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- andrewguenther 9y agoI've seen all of these on Etsy. https://www.etsy.com/shop/thepatentoffice https://www.etsy.com/shop/thepatentoffice
- iamwil 9y ago- Flux Capacitor
- iamwil 9y agoI learned that Elon's middle name is Reeve.
- watsonc73 9y agoThat was also a surprise to us too!
- johnnydoe9 9y agoFound out about this a couple months ago via the Lazy Game Reviews channel, have the PS 4 Controller one on my wall I love it.
- watsonc73 9y agoGreat to hear. Thanks for the support.
- elmarschraml 9y agoUnrelated to the site, but about the patents: How can a specific games console, like the Nintendo 64, be patented? The name of the product, and maybe some brand-specific design elements, is a registered brand, sure. But a patent is for an invention, and it's not like a specific games console is a new invention - just a variant on the existing invention "games console"?
- duskwuff 9y agoMost of these are design patents. They cover the physical form of the console -- not its function.
- 725686 9y agoI saw this idea way back on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Bathroom-Patent-Wall-Art-Prints/dp/B01CD3X2BA/ref=pd_sbs_201_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B01CD3X2BA&pd_rd_r=KSHR53D25MWJBHP0MNZ5&pd_rd_w=deDdf&pd_rd_wg=cyghX&psc=1&refRID=KSHR53D25MWJBHP0MNZ5 https://www.amazon.com/Bathroom-Patent-Wall-Art-Prints/dp/B0...
- kermittd 9y agoVery cool!
- imaginenore 9y agoPrevious post of an identical project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990160