On August 17, 1998, three men applied for a patent that envisioned how the future might fuck, before we even had the technology to apply it. Today, it’s officially expired, ending a complicated 20-year relationship between teledildonics and patent law.
Warren J. Sandvick, Jim W. Hughes, and David Alan Atkinson called their patent “Method and device for interactive virtual control of sexual aids using digital computer networks,” or U.S. Patent No. 6,368,268. Sandvick is the president of a Texas company called HasSex, which seems to exist mostly to hold this patent. Since the patent was filed, it’s commonly been referred to as “the teledildonics patent.” In 11 incredible diagrams, it outlines how computers could connect to a device, that connects to another device, that connects to someone else’s setup and voilà: Everyone’s getting off, through the internet.
Utility patents like this one—which protect how something works, not how it looks—have a term of 20 years that starts on the patent application filing date.
Teledildonics, or at least the idea of them, has been around longer than the World Wide Web itself. Technology pioneer Ted Nelson is credited for coining the phrase “teledildonics” in 1975, but David Rothchild’s 1993 essay “High-Tech Sex” is one of the earliest visions of what teledildonics would really look like. He defined it as “the virtual-reality technology that may one day allow people wearing special bodysuits, headgear and gloves to engage in tactile sexual relations from separate, remote locations via computers connected to phone lines,” and that’s pretty much still spot-on. Teledildonics are internet-connected sex toys, put simply.
It was a more optimistic time, just five years before Sandvick, Hughes, and Atkinson even applied for the teledildonics patent. Twenty years later, in 2015, they sold the patent to Tzu Technologies, LLC, which immediately flipped it into a trolling effort. Tzu went after several companies that it claimed violated the patent, and killed a few of them, including an open source vibrator called the Comingle that raised nearly $60,000 in an Indiegogo campaign. Other nascent teledildonic startups caught in the blitz included Holland Haptics, Vibease, Internet Service, Frixion, and Winzz; several of these were forced to pay Tzu more than $50,000.
With its newfound, ruthless owners, the patent earned the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Stupid Patent of the Month in 2015, for being “ridiculously broad” and a case of patent trolling—squatting on a patent that’s so broad and obscure that it can be used to take legal action against a large number of companies, some of which might rather pay the patent holder than fight them in court. “There was nothing novel, nonobvious, or even patentable about this claim,” attorney Vera Ranieri wrote for the EFF. “It never should have been issued. Doing it with a computer (literally) does not make something patentable.”
