US DESIGN PATENTS

During the Great Matt Mason Patent Hunt,(1) I also found the Design Patents for a number of Spacex/GA toys. These have all been granted to Jack Rosenthal on behalf of Rovex Industries Ltd at the address of the Triang works at Merton, London. Except the one for the Prospector/Moon Explorer, which is granted to Rosenthal in person at his home address. From his Project Sword days he must have known this toy design was registered in the UK by Tai-Hing, so this could mean he didn't want to risk putting Triang on the spot but still tried (successfully) to have his version protected in the US.

As a note, the "references cited" on each document are intended to document the "state of the art" of (in this case) other toy designs, to be taken into consideration by the patent officials when judging the degree of improvement and/or novelty of the design in the application. The designs in the cited references will therefore be of a similar type of toy, but will very likely have been chosen for looking considerably different to the toy in the application.

listing

Design Patents listed in numerical order
Click on images to see each document

research notes

I'm pretty sure these are all the documents that can be found, meaning these are all the design patents granted to Rosenthal. I would assume that most if not all toy designs will have been submitted, but not been granted a patent for some reason (usually that the design is not distinct enough from previously patented other toy designs).

The online database at the USPTO only contains scanned images for documents prior to 1976, which can only be retrieved by number. Design Patents being the US equivalent to Registered Designs in Europe means these are not included in European Patent databases (which are otherwise very useful for retrieving pre-1976 US utility patent documents). I have therefore run through all the Design Patent numbers for the relevant period of 1969-73 (looking through a year or two more because patents take awhile to process before being approved and granted) and not found any others than those listed above.

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1) See John Eaton's Major Matt Mason patents page to see everything we found back in 2005. (page opens in a new window) back to text