No Patents on Perpetual Motion Machines

In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!!!

It is always good to revisit the basic, core concepts to reconfirm that you have a firm grasp of the complex. This is true across endeavors. Great cooks sometimes need to remember how to boil an egg. Likewise, software designers sometimes create simple apps using the bare bones code base.

The same is true for patent law.  Recently on the internet, there was a discussion about a supposed "perpetual motion" machine developed by a German tinkerer. A brief article concerning the inventor is here.  One of the points being bandied about in the discussion of a supposedly limitless energy system was that "because it is not a perpetual motion machine, it can be patented".  This is a misinterpretation of U.S. Patent Law.

U.S. Patent law allows for the patenting of "everything under the sun, made by man".  This restriction means that naturally occurring items, as well as purely theoretical constructs are not patenable. For example E=MC2 is not a patentable formula, since it describes a fundamental property of physics. A practicable application of this equation, say a nuclear reactor, would be patentable.  However, recent US case law has held that any preemption of a natural law  that is, a patent that claims all the applications of E=MC2, is also not patentable.

The point here is that natural laws are not defined by Congress, or the Courts. Furthermore, natural laws and laws of nature are only rough approximations of how we believe the world to work.  These laws might be subject to boundary conditions and localized modifications given the right arrangement of energy inputs and conditions. As such, it is possible that the "laws of nature" that you can't patent today, will be different from the laws of nature you can't patent 100 years from now.

This is all to say that you could get a patent on a perpetual motion machine. Merely calling it a perpetual motion machine is not the problem in getting a patent. There is no rule that says per se perpetual-motion, Faster Than Light and teleportation devices are not patentable.

The difficulty is in demonstrating to the patent office that it works. This is called the enablement requirement. If you show up to the patent office with a patent application that describes the mechanism of action as a perpetual motion machine, then you are going to need some extraordinary evidence to back that claim up. If you show the world a device that apparently accepts no input but continued to do work, then you will get a patent, so long as others can reproduce your results. What you can't do, is claim on paper to have a device that goes against our current understanding of science and expect to be granted a patent.

 In fact that Patent Office does not even require you to advance a theory as to why the device works in the first place in order to get a patent. A patent is simply a contract between an inventor and some territorial organization (e.g. The United States of America or France). This agreement states, explicitly, that as the inventor of  a improvement in a technical field, you are granted a limited monopoly to make, use and sell that improvement. In exchange for this monopoly, granted and enforced by the government, you must disclose the invention to the public (i.e. the world) in sufficient detail such that any one skilled in that technology can make and use the invention without resorting to undue experimentation.

 If you have a perpetual motion machine, and you can satisfy this requirement, then you will get a patent on it. The underling laws of physics that you are bending breaking or modifying are of no consequence.