Handy Humper stopped at the border

A nice spicy story in the New York Daily News today.

http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2010/07/02/2010-07-02_sextoy_makers_patience_reaches_climax.html. It would be an easy and cheap shot to follow the editor of the site and try a few double-entendres (fnaar, fnaar-gosh I’ve just remembered Finbarr Saunders  from Viz, left–is Viz still going?) but the heart of the story is about how powerful IP can be in just about any market. And this, apparently, is a very large market.

The reference to the ITC is one that anyone who knows IP in the US will know well. The International Trade Commission is a quite excellent way to use IP to stop foreign imports at, or actually before, they get to the US border, described here in Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_International_Trade_Commission

You can just imagine the male patent attorney who wrote the patents smirking and sniggering Finbarr style at the unique and non-obvious features of his client’s products. But when the impact is that the Handy Humper and the Travel Honeypot are stopped from entering the US market (that one was not deliberate but I really should take it out in the next edit) one can begin to see that IP makes its mark in most every business and market.