5 Of The Strangest Patents Owned By Tech Brands

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Tech companies love to brag about their near-infinite research budgets, promising us a future filled with quantum computers, foldable screens, and all the gadgets we'll supposedly use tomorrow. To lock down these ideas, corporations file thousands of patents every single year. You'd likely expect these legal documents to cover things like fancy-pants algorithms and the advanced microchips that'll power the next generation of smartphones. However, if you actually dig deep into the archives of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, you'll find plenty of filings that are straight-up baffling.

Earth's biggest and most recognizable tech brands have successfully patented painfully mundane concepts or downright terrifying dystopian ideas. These filings often leave industry observers scratching their heads or deeply unsettled, wondering how these concepts sneaked past the supposedly strict intellectual property (IP) review process. This highlights a weird reality of the tech industry: mega-corporations will rush to legally claim ownership over practically everything under the sun. And according to these patents, sometimes it's just a microscopic tweak to an idea that's already existed for years.

Taking a closer look at these bizarre patents reveals a wildly entertaining (albeit somewhat questionable) side of the consumer electronics world. From a literal paper bag to a nightmarish advertising concept, here are five of the strangest patents ever owned by tech brands.

When you think about the products engineered in Cupertino, Apple's wireless earbuds and sleek laptops are what immediately come to mind. And when you buy these products from an Apple Store, you're probably only thinking about the things you're carrying out of the store, not what you're carrying them out in. Yet back in 2016, the tech giant officially filed a patent application for a paper bag. The document detailed a specific container made from white solid bleached sulfate paper with at least 60% post-consumer recycled content.

The reasoning behind this surprisingly boring patent actually stems from the company pushing big environmental initiatives. To honor that, yet still make a bag that matches the premium shopping experience the company tries to give its customers, Apple had its engineering team create special reinforcement inserts that boost the bag's structural integrity. It was an incredibly over-engineered solution to an everyday retail problem, complete with complex diagrams that look exactly like the plain bags handed out at any department store.

Sure, it's easy to mock a multi-trillion dollar corporation for patenting folding paper, but the move highlights Apple's fierce dedication to controlling its public image. Protecting the structural design of a bag prevents competing retailers from mimicking that exact premium carrying experience, proving that tech giants obsess over (and try to own) every tiny detail.

Scroll through Amazon's many wares, and one visual element remains entirely consistent: isolated products sitting against a perfectly seamless white background. This clean visual style makes it easy to clearly view a product and has been a cornerstone of commercial photography for decades, heavily utilized long before the internet even existed. Amazingly, the largest online retailer in the world managed to secure a patent for this exact, incredibly common studio arrangement. The legal filing essentially claimed total ownership over the specific process of capturing subjects against a brightly lit backdrop.

The approved patent application reads just like a tutorial for a high school photography class. It outlines positioning a subject on a cyclorama, as well as the specifics of how to set up the other elements, like the lighting. Amazon successfully convinced the patent office that this was a unique, proprietary-enough invention and not a universally practiced photography technique. It's the equivalent of trying to patent a basic sandwich by specifying the exact ratio of ingredients.

Naturally, this wildly bold intellectual property claim sparked intense outrage across the professional photography community. The filing served mostly as a bizarre defensive measure, and remains a silly, if not questionable, footnote in tech history.

Before heading out on a tropical vacation or an extra-long holiday weekend, nearly every office worker on the planet sets up an automated reply message saying they are out of office. It's an informative nicety embedded into every major email platform on the internet at this point. But in spite of this concept's long-time ubiquity, multinational computing giant IBM decided it needed to secure a patent for an "out-of-office electronic mail messaging system," and in early 2017, it finally did. The application was originally filed back in 2010, which was long after automated replies had already become a corporate staple.

The baffling approval of this equally-baffling patent drew immediate and harsh criticism from digital rights advocates across the web. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out that granting legal ownership over such a mundane, everyday concept was utter "nonsense." The entire premise of the IP system relies on an invention being both novel and non-obvious, and automated vacation replies clearly fail on both counts. Critics argued that allowing one huge corporation to own this basic software function could lead to disastrous legal battles across the entire software industry.

IBM also faced widespread public backlash and endless internet shaming, as it did when it tried to replace its workforce with AI. But eventually IBM decided to do the right thing and decided not to enforce the patent. Now anyone can be set to "out of office" without fear of getting sued by Big Blue.

Pretty much everyone hates commercials, and we all scramble for the remote to mute or skip past anything interrupting our favorite TV shows. Back in 2012, Sony actively tried to capitalize on this universal annoyance by securing a patent officially titled a "System for converting television commercials into interactive networked video games." While that might sound fun in theory, the actual details listed in the patent filing were really an advertising nightmare that would force viewers to interact with ads verbally.

The most insane part of this, hidden within the patent illustrations, shows a viewer lounging on their couch as a fast-food commercial starts playing. To make the ad end, the viewer literally has to shout the brand name directly at their TV. According to the document, the system would use a camera and microphone setup to verify that viewers actively participated in the corporate chant before allowing their show to resume.

It's a concept that feels like it's ripped straight out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, effectively holding your favorite TV shows hostage until you comply with what feels like some kind of brand loyalty test. Thankfully, Sony never actually implemented this nightmare fuel into any of its television models. While the patent is active and doesn't expire until 2030, hopefully Sony is leaving it behind as a slightly terrifying piece of IP history. Maybe we'd all be better off just checking out a stack of books from the library instead.

While Sony's patent was ridiculous, this one from Microsoft feels morally outrageous. Losing a loved one is a universally tragic experience, but Microsoft decided to explore whether artificial intelligence could somehow soften the blow. In late 2020, Microsoft was granted a patent that outlined a way to create a conversational chatbot modeled after a specific person. While creating digital avatars is not entirely new, the patent language explicitly detailed that the subject could be a "past or present" entity, opening the door for literal digital necromancy.

The technical framework proposed in the filing paperwork involved scraping large amounts of personal data to train the AI model. By analyzing a deceased person's social media posts, private emails, texts, voice recordings, and photos, the system could then theoretically generate a chatbot that mimics their exact personality and speaking style. It effectively promised a future where grieving relatives could simply open an application and continue having conversations with digital ghosts.

Unsurprisingly, the public reaction to this idea was a mixture of abject horror and ethical outrage. Critics quickly pointed out the massive consent issues involved in digitally resurrecting someone who never agreed to the process. Following this backlash, Microsoft executives publicly admitted the concept was "disturbing" and promised it had zero active plans to develop the terrifying product.