I'm Dr. Joshua Schwimmer, a nephrologist and internal medicine physician in New York City. • Kidney Notes was the first active nephrology blog. (Trivia: Kidney Notes is so old that the National Library of Medicine still uses it as an example of how to formally cite blogs.) • Professionally, you can find me at Kidney.nyc. • Kidney Notes is for educational purposes only, not medical advice. Consult qualified health care professionals. See disclaimer.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

What Do You Get When You Design A Condom Men Want To Use? Sued.

Via Salon, which often entertains:
In a courtroom in New Jersey, lawyers are arguing about condom size.

The case is a patent-infringement suit. In the normal run of events, such cases are mind-numbingly boring. But when the product in question is a condom, and the patents at issue refer to design modifications that are supposed to increase male pleasure during the sexual act, you're not dealing with a normal legal situation...

We'll get back to condom size in a moment. (Suffice it to say, size matters.) For now, the basics are this: A company called Portfolio Technologies (PTI) is suing the conglomerate that owns the makers of Trojan condoms, who recently brought to market a popular condom called the Twisted Pleasure...

This isn't PTI's first attempt to defend its patents. Five years ago, it failed in a similar effort to prevent another condom, the Inspiral, from being distributed in the United States. And here is where a kinky story starts to get a little bizarre. All three condoms -- the Pleasure Plus, the Inspiral and the Trojan Twisted Pleasure -- were designed by the same man, one Dr. Alla Venkata Krishna Reddy...
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