According to an article in a London evening newspaper "London Lite", tonight:Russian mobile phone tycoon Oleg Teterin has trademarked the emoticon. It means companies who wish the group of punctuation marks that convey a wink must now pay "tens of thousands of dollars" for a licence.What a clever ******.I wonder what else there is out there to be grabbed. 

don't know that he's all that clever; good luck to him in collecting the fortune owed him.

You can only patent something if you invented it before someone else, and the only really effective way to prove that you did that, is to post your idea to yourself, normal mail, recorded delivery once you have invented it.

I can't see as he will get a single penny from it.

Actually you don't have to invent something to patent it, you don't even have to file the patent before someone else invented it. You just have to convince a patent officer that your patent filing is somehow unique and non-obvious, and that there is no prior art. Posting something to yourself doesn't count as prior art. Patent law sucks big time.. it allows people with money to file patents for things they didn't invent and prevent people who may actually have invented something similar from benefiting from their ideas. I've been filing patents for my software for about 10 years.. believe me it sucks more than you'd think possible.

Stu....I think that that posting thing is for copyright protection, not patent.

I don't pretend to understand it. I just thought that if true, he was clever to spot the untaken opportunity.

There must be others out there.

;-)

Send me a bill, Oleg.