Google’s popular homepage doodles got patent protection

It all started 1998 when Sergey Brin and Larry Page tweaked the Google homepage logo to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man festival. Google (GOOG) co-founder Brin filed the patent application on April 30, 2001.

Google's patent application reads: "a system provides a periodically changing story line and/or a special event company logo to entice users to access a web page. For the story line, the system may receive objects that tell a story according to the story line and successively provide the objects on the web page for predetermined or random amounts of time. For the special event company logo, the system may modify a standard company logo for a special event to create a special event logo, associate one or more search terms with the special event logo, and upload the special event logo to the web page. The system may then receive a user selection of the special event logo and provide search results relating to the special event."

The granted patent (Patent 7,912,915) is for "systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site." But not everyone is pleased.

Business Insider's Matt Rosoff commented that this patent is an abomination of the patent system. He argued that: "The patent system was originally created to foster innovation by protecting small inventors from having their ideas ripped off by big companies. But increasingly, big companies are using patents for exactly the opposite reason--to stop competitors from innovating."

TechDirt's Mike Masnick uses it to show how mad the system has gotten. He hopes that “Google plans to use this patent as an example of...just how ridiculous the patent system is becoming".

In the mean time, just enjoy the doodles...