Accord­ing to The Reg­is­ter “In a move that has sur­prised naïve observers, the US Patent Office has announced that from now on it will con­sider ‘seri­ous’ appli­ca­tions to patent spe­cific inte­ger numbers.”

As far as I’m con­cerned this only means one thing; I own the num­ber 101 because it’s the sec­ond half of my often used moniker on Instant Mes­sen­ger. From now on any­one that uses this par­tic­u­lar num­ber inte­ger will have to pay roy­al­ties in the form of $.50 for every instance used of said num­ber. Fail­ure to com­ply with this “patent” will result in an auto­matic court sum­mo­nance (not optional by the way).

Con­sider the exam­ple above a silly one, but some­thing that will even­tu­ally make sense if the US Patent office is seri­ously con­sid­er­ing this pre­pos­ter­ous idea.