Barks and the refloated ship - scan request

[Olivier]

Hi everyone!


- Daniël -


I have found a very interesting text by searching for "Karl Kroyer"::
http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/priorart/
Halfway down the page you will come to the "When Is Something Prior Art
Against a Patent?" section; Kroyer & the ducks are mentioned in the third
subpart, "Enabling Disclosure". I copy the text in PS.

Kroyer may have read Barks' delightful story (the salvage method is funny,
but I love even more how Scrooge manages to make Donald work for him for
nothing).
What seems more certain is that someone at the Patent Office had read it,
and therefore rejected Kroyer's application-- or Kroyer may leaned over the
desk and candidly told the Patent Office clerck, "Hey, you'll never guess
how I got the idea..."

I guess this also means that the ever alert employees jot down the
references of  any invention they may find in fiction, just in case.
Imagine that, coming up with a great idea, spending weeks and months and
years developing it, only to find you can't patent it because a "silly kids'
comics" artist thought of  it before you and it only took him a few days and
he didn't even reap the benefits of  it.


The "Sunken Yacht" story is also mentioned in "the Science of  Superheroes":
http://www.forskning.no/Artikler/2003/februar/1045138682.53


http://www.sket.dk/0103.html  also has the date of  1965 (January 3) instead
of  1964.


My search also turned up this page:
http://www.cbarks.dk/BRUDSTYKKERNE.htm
I can't find Kroye's name in it however.
I have a question regarding the fourth red frame starting from the bottom of
the page: could someone translate & explain me the link between JFK & Barks,
please?


This author of  this page obviously has not read the comic:
http://actscom.com/store/daily2.htm

Yet another page on the Al-Kuwait story:
http://members.tripod.com/earthdude1/donald_duck/donald_duck.html



Best wishes to all of  you,

Olivier



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- PS -

Enabling disclosure
Another requirement for document to qualify as prior art is that it is
enabling. In other words, the document must enable an average skilled person
to practice the invention as claimed. A science-fiction novel might describe
an invention without going into details. While this will describe the basic
idea behind the invention, it does not enable the skilled person to
construct the invention. For example, the famous Star Trek TV series
features the so-called "transporter", by which Starfleet personnel could be
"beamed down" to the surface of the planet. However, no details were ever
given on how the transporter was supposed to work, or how anyone could build
it. If someone today were to invent a working matter transporter that
operated in exactly the same way as in Star Trek, he would still be able to
obtain a patent on it. The disclosure given in the TV series would not be
sufficient to destroy novelty of the features of his transporter.

That does not mean that fiction cannot be used as prior art at all. If the
fiction describes the invention in sufficient detail, it counts as prior art
just like a technical publication would. A famous example is the case of a
method to recover sunken ships by filling them with buoyant bodies fed
through a tube. This method was used in 1964 to recover the freighter
Al-Kuwait from the bottom of the Persian Gulf. The Danish inventor Karl
Kroeyer tried to get a patent for this method, but his patent application
(amongst others, in the UK GB 1070600 and in the Netherlands NL 6514306) was
rejected for lack of novelty. The prior art? In 1949 the Donald Duck story
The Sunken Yacht (by Carl Barks) shows Donald and the nephews raising a ship
by filling it with ping pong balls shoved through a tube. Since ping pong
balls are buoyant bodies, and they were fed to the yacht through a tube, the
Donald Duck episode was considered novelty-destroying prior art.

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