
Show HN: Retro Patents – Tech patents turned into art - Mikhus
https://www.retropatents.com
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habosa
I'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.

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freshyill
Completely agreed. The schematics look great, and the text totally throws it
off as an art piece.

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watsonc73
Thanks 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!

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gatesphere
So, maybe offer both styles?

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irfanka
Sounds like a reasonable thing to do - and it's just an additional checkbox on
the website, so it's easy too!

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tgb
Also potentially stocking twice as many items and increasing design work load.

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tbirdz
As 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?

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GuiA
Our 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.

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chrisfosterelli
Do you drive all the way to the farm to get your groceries? Or do you get them
at a grocery store?

Convenience adds value.

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GuiA
I grow them in my yard.

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watsonc73
Happy 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
Why not the "classics" like the Edsison light bulb or the Wright flyer patent?
I consider the old ones to be beautiful

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jaclaz
+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_patent...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_US_patents)

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.

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aurora-
These 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
glad you like them and good choice :)

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mysterydip
These 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.

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watsonc73
Great idea - we'll look into this, thanks!

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it__guy
Love 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

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watsonc73
Awesome suggestion! Sounds like a fun summer project.

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iplaw
Two 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.

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fascinated
Looking forward to some Lodsys or Intellectual Ventures pieces, patents are
great

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kingbirdy
I've seen a lot of similar "patents as art" sites - anything that sets you
apart?

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watsonc73
AFAIK 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.

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dickfickling
I 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-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/a4i3yhsg9jpobhj/Screenshot%202017-05-26%2010.15.30.png?dl=0)

~~~
Flammy
I 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)

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725686
I saw this idea way back on amazon:

[https://www.amazon.com/Bathroom-Patent-Wall-Art-
Prints/dp/B0...](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)

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elmarschraml
Unrelated 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"?

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duskwuff
Most of these are design patents. They cover the physical form of the console
-- not its function.

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johnnydoe9
Found 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
Great to hear. Thanks for the support.

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cubano
Very smart idea..and nice execution. Great job.

What techie wouldn't love one (or four as a nice matrix) of these?

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watsonc73
Thanking you kindly!

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tgb
I'd buy one of the Selectric typewriter for my dad if it were​ available!

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watsonc73
There's a contact us section on the site where we collect all patent requests
- please feel free to submit some!

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imaginenore
Previous post of an identical project:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990160)

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iamwil
I learned that Elon's middle name is Reeve.

~~~
watsonc73
That was also a surprise to us too!

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kermittd
Very cool!

