squelchtone wrote:Are you looking for a real lock or a photo of it or patent drawings? What is this for?
Some competitor of John's is (apparently) looking to invalidate his patent by establishing prior art (i.e., that the idea behind the patent was previously in use in some other product). There are a few websites like this one: basically, people post bounties ($5000 in this case), and try to "crowdsource" their patent investigations. In this case, if you can provide prior art that would potentially invalidate John's patent you might share in some of the $5k "reward".
"karris" works for Article One (she's their Director of Research). Given that John's patent doesn't have anything to do with the original topic of this thread -- and that it seems that karris seems to just be asking people to come visit his company's website -- this all seems a little spammish to me.
Just my $0.02.
