The Car Periscope: Lessons from Curb Your Enthusiasm.

This article (and the video above) dives into one of my favorite episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm—Season 8, Episode 8, “Car Periscope.”

An Investment in Creativity

In the Curb episode, Larry invests in a strange but tantalizing invention: a car periscope that lets drivers see past objects (like trucks) that block their view of the road ahead. It’s a wildly imaginative concept that makes you think, Why hasn’t someone done this already?

Well, someone has.

The Real Car Periscope

In 1975, Belgian inventor Allen Levy patented a car periscope. The invention was created to solve the same problem Curb’s fictional invention solves. This would have made an investment in the invention a terrible idea. A little bit of research and a lot of critical thought could have helped Larry avoid the problem.

Lessons for Inventors

There are some real-world takeaways from the episode.

Before investing time or money into your idea, decide whether to search for prior art. Even where you think it is impossible that somebody else came up with the concept, you could easily be wrong. A personal example is when I was asked to develop improvements to animal welfare in factory farming. Since I can’t stop the practice, I was absolutely excited to at least make the practice less harsh on the animals. My invention? A virtual environment for cows. Yes, I dealt with the issues of resistance to movement to prevent the cows from walking into the walls and other details, but that’s not what is important. The important part is that I took a pass on a prior art search before submitting my invention because “there can’t possibly be anybody else who thought of something this unusual”.

Nope, I got it wrong. There was already a patent for a system that was very close to what I had invented — close enough to render the minor differences between the patent and my system unpatentable. Tools like Google Patents or the USPTO’s search system could have helped me uncover this patent before the embarrassment of submitting a patent candidate that was not even novel.

Now let’s discuss why a prior art search might be a problem (at a minimum, you need to do it right). It is critical that you keep track of what you’ve found so that you can provide a list to your patent lawyer. You are going to need to file an Information Disclosure Statement, because the patent office rules say that “applicants and other individuals substantively involved with the preparation and/or prosecution of the application have a duty to submit to the Office information which is material to patentability as defined in 37 CFR 1.56.”

A failure to disclose known prior art (any art the patent examiner may find relevant to patentability, even if it doesn’t block patent issuance) will be looked into by counsel for the infringer in any infringement suit (trust me, in suits where tens or hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, they don’t skimp on the lawyers). If they find you downloaded or read prior art that should have been disclosed, but did not disclose it, it can result in an invalidation of your patent. Since tracking cookies and single sign on mean that at least one of the big tech companies will have a record of your finding the prior art, there is likely evidence of it. Where there are typically many millions at stake, you should expect that an infringer will subpoena all of that to prove inequitable conduct and invalidate your patent.

Larry was very enthusiastic about the car periscope. But he invested without having a patent lawyer review whether (a) a patent already existed covering the technology or (b) it was patentable. The current inventor hostility that many examiners and courts have could easily have resulted in a rejection — a periscope has been used in submarines for a century to see past obstructions (i.e. the ocean water). A submarine is also a vehicle. It would have been obvious for somebody of ordinary skill in the art to build this invention.

Another point is that most patents don’t monetize. Since Allen Levy patented this invention in 1975, there appear to have been no vehicles produced (or modified) with the patented system. Self-driving cars use an analogous system, but even if Levy’s claims had covered those, they would have long expired before they were infringed. Before spending a lot of money and effort on a patent application, make sure that you have a plan to monetize it. Of course, if you are a huge corporation, you can use first mover advantage to grab the market before a competitor does even without a patent, but for small inventors that usually isn’t practicable.

A Shout-Out to Creativity

Episodes like Car Periscope celebrate innovation, highlight the delight and wonder of creating a thing that didn’t exist before (at least in the episode, which was true; we know it isn’t true in real life), and encourage people to exercise their creativity. It isn’t easy to move from idea to invention to patent to monetization, but a good sense of humor can help a lot.

And We’re Out

Whether it’s a car periscope or another innovation, research and hard work are key.