Patent infringement?

Over the past, oh, two years perhaps, my lovely wife has been pitching an idea for a patentable product. Inspired by my patent work, and never void of her own bevy of ideas, her idea was to prepackage charcoal in little pyramids that held together on their own. That way, when you wanted to start a charcoal grill, you could just drop one of these preformed pyramids of charcoal on the grill, light it (it would also be ingitable), and presto! Burned burgers await! (...since I'm usually the one that does the actual grilling in our house...) She even had a marketable name for the idea -- Bar-B-Cubes. You could package several pyramids together in one cube. Not bad, eh? Everyone she has presented this idea to (roughly 3500 people) has found it to be a novel enterprise, but we've just never had a way to light a fire under the idea (har har).

While on vacation last week, we stopped at a gas station just outside Athens, Georgia. While I was in the restroom, I heard a shriek that was instantly recognizable as someone related to myself. I dashed to Erin's aid, and when I arrived, she was standing aghast at the product which sat before her very eyes on the shelf at the quickie mart -- CharCones. They even have a pretty snappy website. Erin was horrified, and she immediately came to the conclusion that her idea had been unscrupulously stolen by one of the 3500 people to which she had conveyed it. She also was convinced that the existence of CharCones meant that Grace's instant college fund had just vanished, not to mention my purchase of whatever new iPod gets released in the next few months.

So here we sit...still looking for the next great idea. Perhaps we'd still have a charcoal grill if CharCones had arrived on the scene just a little sooner.

Bret