The Five-Year-Old Who Patented Swinging on a Swing

US6368227 was granted on April 9, 2002, to Steven Olson of St. Paul, Minnesota. The title is "Method of Swinging on a Swing." The patent describes, in formal patent language, the act of pulling alternately on the left and right chains of a playground swing in order to induce a sideways oscillation rather than the conventional front-and- back motion. The applicant, Steven Olson, was five years old at the time the application was filed.

The applicant's father, Peter Olson, was a patent attorney at Faegre & Benson in Minneapolis. He has since explained, in multiple interviews, that the filing was a demonstration. He wanted to show his son — and, he hoped, anyone else paying attention — "the absurd ease with which trivial patents can be obtained."

The USPTO granted it.

The reaction

Within a month of issue, the patent had become a minor international news story. The USPTO took the unusual step of issuing a public statement acknowledging that the grant had been a mistake and that the patent would be reexamined. The reexamination concluded in July of 2003. The patent was officially canceled.

The case became one of the most-cited examples in the long-running argument that the US patent system, particularly in the years after the 1990s software-patent expansion, had become structurally incapable of distinguishing genuine inventions from things every five-year-old already knows how to do. Patent examiners were given an average of something like 19 hours to evaluate each application. Prior art searches missed obvious prior art. Applications that should have been rejected were granted as a matter of overwhelmed routine.

What it actually proved

Critics of the swing patent often note that it was, in the end, revoked — that the system worked, however slowly. Peter Olson's reply was that this missed the point. The system had granted the patent in the first place. Every patent that gets granted erroneously is an enforceable legal weapon for the eighteen months or so before someone notices. Most trivial patents are not noticed. Most are not, like this one, filed deliberately to be absurd. Most are filed by companies, against competitors, in earnest.

The five-year-old's patent was the cheapest, most efficient critique of the modern US patent system anyone had ever filed.

See the original

The text of US6368227, including the figures of the swing in lateral motion, is still on the public record at patents.us.