A patent ( /ˈpætənt/ or /ˈpeɪtənt/) is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention.

The procedure for granting patents, the requirements placed on the patentee, and the extent of the exclusive rights vary widely between countries according to national laws and international agreements. Typically, however, a patent application must include one or more claims defining the invention which must meet the relevant patentability requirements such as novelty and non-obviousness. The exclusive right granted to a patentee in most countries is the right to prevent others from making, using, selling, or distributing the patented invention without permission.

Under the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, patents should be available in WTO member states for any invention, in all fields of technology, and the term of protection available should be a minimum of twenty years. In many countries, certain subject areas are excluded from patents, such as business methods and computer programs.

Drew Curtis (born February 7, 1973) is the founder and an administrator of Fark.com, an Internet news aggregator. He is also the author of It's Not News, It's FARK: How Mass Media Tries to Pass off Crap as News in May 2007. He is a guest on WOCM's morning show The Rude Awakening Show every Tuesday.

Fark began in 1993 when Curtis was a student in England, sending links back to his friends. Curtis registered Fark.com in 1997 but did not begin posting links on the site until 1999. The first story on Fark was a news article about a fighter pilot who crashed while attempting to moon another fighter pilot. Since then, the site has become one of the most popular link dump sites on the internet with nearly 50 million pageviews a month. As of 2006 the site was getting over 2,000 link submissions every day. It was the first indie blog to earn one million dollars a year in profit and its classifieds section alone generates as much as $40,000 per year.

Although Fark is a million-dollar business, Curtis takes a yearly salary of $60,000. The rest of the money goes to the site's legal 'war chest' and to pay other expenses. Under Curtis, Fark has purposely shied away from the Web 2.0 mantra of total user control. "I don't care what anyone says, the masses are morons. You can't count on them to pick good stuff. Just check out Network TV to see what the masses want for entertainment. There's certainly a place for that kind of thing but it's not on Fark." According to Drew, Web 3.0 will be "something called Good Editing." Speaking at a media conference in Washington, DC hosted by the Poynter Institute, Curtis stated, "The 'wisdom of the crowds' is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb. It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter."

Anders Håkan Lans (born 2 November 1947) is a Swedish inventor. His patented inventions are a color graphics processor ("Data processing system and apparatus for color graphics display") and an "Arrangement for producing a pattern on a light-sensitive surface"

Håkan Lans is the designer of a tracking system which makes use of a Self-Organized Time Division Multiple Access (STDMA) datalink. The STDMA datalink is currently in use in Automatic Identification System (AIS). AIS is a short range coastal tracking system which is mandatory aboard international voyaging ships with gross tonnage (GT) of 300 or more tons, and all passenger ships regardless of size.

STDMA is also in use as one of the three physical layer models proposed for Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B), a cooperative surveillance technique for air traffic control which is in the process of implementation.

Lans has his own company, GP&C Systems International AB, which is focused on marketing STDMA.

Concerning the patent on colour computer graphics, Lans has sued several companies, including Compaq, Gateway and Hewlett Packard for not paying royalties, and allegedly infringing on his patent. The companies were then sued for patent infringement by Lans, as a private person. The defendants counterclaimed that the patent was assigned to Uniboard AB, a company wholly owned by Lans. The judge ruled that this was the case and thus Lans lost the case. This has led to a dispute between Lans and his attorney, Louis Mastriani, and his lawyer in Sweden, Talbot Lindström, who Lans has sued for misconduct. This suite was settled in April 2012. An allegation was presented on Swedish National Television that Lindström's conduct was due to alleged connections with the The Pentagon, in order to stop Lans' progress on his STDMA patent.

Adam Carolla (born May 27, 1964) is an American radio personality, television host, comedian, and actor. He hosts The Adam Carolla Show, a talk show distributed as a podcast which set the record as the "most downloaded podcast" as judged by Guinness World Records.

Carolla co-hosted the syndicated radio call-in program Loveline from 1995 to 2005 as well as the show's television incarnation on MTV from 1996 to 2000. He was the co-host and co-creator of the television program The Man Show (1999–2004), and the co-creator and a regular performer on the television show Crank Yankers (2002–2007). He hosted The Adam Carolla Project, a home improvement television program which aired on TLC in 2005 and The Car Show on Speed TV in 2011.

Carolla has also appeared on the network reality television programs Dancing with the Stars and The Celebrity Apprentice. His book, In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks, debuted on The New York Times Best Seller list in 2010.

Carolla was born in Los Angeles, California. His father, Jim Carolla, a psychologist of Italian heritage, and his mother, Kris (née Novello), who is of Hungarian descent, separated when Adam was young. Carolla was not given a middle name; on his driver's license application he filled the "middle name" blank with "Lakers" (after his love for the Los Angeles Lakers professional basketball team) and the made-up name still appears on his license.