La volta che Paperino bruciò sul tempo l’inventore

Ecco come un papero disegnato ruppe le uova nel paniere di Karl Krøyer, che inventò un sistema per recuperare imbarcazioni inabissatesi. La storia viene raccontata su Ius Mentis con l’articolo The “Donald Duck as prior art” case:

In 1949 the Donald Duck story The Sunken Yacht (by Carl Barks) shows Donald and the nephews

raising a ship by filling it with ping pong balls shoved through a tube, as can be seen below in the images cited from that story.

Since ping pong balls are buoyant bodies, and they were fed to the yacht through a tube, the Donald Duck episode discloses the same technique as that which is claimed in the patents. Consequently, the Duck story has to be considered novelty-destroying prior art: given the story, any Patent Office would have rejected Krøyer’s patent application.