I bought a nice hat from http://www.kleinbottle.com/ and he sent me pictures of it being packaged up, so this sort of thing has been done before. I've no idea about patentability though.
The Patent and Trademark Office prohibits holders of business degrees and software engineering degrees from joining the patent bar or being patent examiners. Those practitioners are required to have other kinds of engineering degrees only (plus a law degree).
Partly as a result, patent examiners do not consider commercial software and business practices to be 'prior art' and patent examiners do not search, even on a superficial level, business magazines, case studies, ACM journals, commercial computer magazines or such materials in 'prior art' searches. The PTO considers that anything in those fields can be patented including common established techniques and obvious combinations.
There has been some talk lately about submarine patents that apply to Theora or H264. One other kind of patent that is likely to apply to both is patents that have not been applied for yet. The PTO seems to have no trouble at all granting a monopoly on existing practices. Microsoft lost hundreds of millions of dollars over in-place editing of linked objects, a technology that had been running on windows for years before another company applied for a patent on it.
This, if true, completely flies in the face of the expectation that patents are not obvious to, and can be read and understood by, a person skilled in the art. No average software engineer could implement a system based on reading its patent, and no average software engineer would think these sorts of patents are inventive.
I once bought an MP3 player, and the bill inside the package featured an ID number in extra-big letters -- for video documentation, as the small writing said. (They didn't offer me the videos except in case of dispute, though).
Since the player in question was a Frontier Nex IA, this must have been quite some time ago.
Partly as a result, patent examiners do not consider commercial software and business practices to be 'prior art' and patent examiners do not search, even on a superficial level, business magazines, case studies, ACM journals, commercial computer magazines or such materials in 'prior art' searches. The PTO considers that anything in those fields can be patented including common established techniques and obvious combinations.
There has been some talk lately about submarine patents that apply to Theora or H264. One other kind of patent that is likely to apply to both is patents that have not been applied for yet. The PTO seems to have no trouble at all granting a monopoly on existing practices. Microsoft lost hundreds of millions of dollars over in-place editing of linked objects, a technology that had been running on windows for years before another company applied for a patent on it.