Comment Popular literature is "Prior Art" (Score 1) 75
While it's not an obvious source of comedy, internationally-recognized patent law is actually a rather funny thing. Just ask Danish engineer and inventor Karl Kroyer, whose method of raising sunken vessels from the ocean floor failed to obtain a patent because of a comic strip.
The German patent office denied Kroyer's claim based on the patent law concept of "prior art," which essentially means you can't patent an idea that someone has publicly described in the past, even if that idea wasn't patented.