Ridiculous history is a production of I Heart Radio. The Welcome back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you as always so much for

tuning in. Let's give a shout out to the man the myth the legend even

after a long weekend it's our super producer Mr Max Williams.

Whoa who who happy labor day guys. Max the Patent Troll Williams.

It's true.

Every day he trolling.

And you're Toll Brown.

And I'm Ben Bullen and recently in an episode or I should say a series on the history of drive-ins

we talked about the guy who patented the concept of a drive-in.

Richard Milton Hollingshead Jr. That's right, great name.

Great idea. I do believe there was there were some questions that popped up

immediately on the inherent novelty of this idea in terms of like the setup and what made it patent worthy.

And then we kind of got into that and explained a little bit of the nature of patents and the time limits and all of that in the episode.

But today we're going to get a lot deeper into the concepts of patents in general,

which I think is something that a lot of people might be a little

hazy on I certainly was yeah turns out there's a reason it's an entire

specialization for the lawyer types this is not the history of intellectual property.

Please check out our two-part episode last year on IP and shout out to the big mouse. For now, like you said, no, I think patents are pretty

confusing to the average person. Before we dive in, we have to define what a patent is and luckily at least the definition of a patent is

is pretty agreed upon.

For decades the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold,

with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene.

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