Small Penis Rule

In patent law, there's a principle with a surprisingly crude name: the Small Penis Rule. It holds that trivial variations on existing inventions don't qualify for patents. According to the concept, the U.S. Patent Office rejects modifications so obvious they barely count as innovation. It's a colorful way of expressing a real legal threshold — an invention must be genuinely non-obvious to warrant protection. The term recently gained attention when Hacker News users shared the Wikipedia article exploring this quirky corner of intellectual property law.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton