Litterfree cat box

United States Patent: 6,561,132

This was a cool idea. A cat box that flushes the waste, thus its no longer necessary to empty the cat box. Its a whole lot cooler, and more effective than the Littermaid.

Unfortunately, like many startups, they went out of business. Usually when that happens, is folks fail to pay their fees to the USPTO, and the patent dies. Well, apparently, the fees are still being paid, although it can take a while for such info to be published.

My guess is they priced it way too low. Its a complex piece of equipment, and the $299 selling price they had pretty much guaranteed they made little to no money on it (sort of like Microsoft selling the new Xbox 360 for $300 under their costs to build). I think their intent was to make their money on consumables. It uses a special deodorant, and the actual litter itself is pretty high tech. Unfortunately, the consumables have a long life time, so they might have gotten into a serious problem with cash flow.

What makes this patent especially interesting is the claims only refer to the high tech litter, and not to the cat box. What is even more interesting is that most of the patent is related to the litter box itself, rather than the litter which was claimed.

My guess, is that the patent sat at the USPTO, and had not been reviewed until after the company went out of business. Once the examiner got around to looking into it, he found problems with the claims for the litter box in and of itself. (Thats usually the case, the examiners will approve a few claims, and will open a dialog on the rest of them). Since no one answered the claims on the litter box itself, they were disallowed, and the patent was issued minus the claims for the litter box. Now IANAL, but based upon my own dealings with the USPTO, that seems a reasonable assumption.

Of course, this makes for a difficult situation for someone to pick up and move forward with the design. In effect, the cat box is in the public domain, short of any patented prior art, as there were no claims. This makes it very difficult for another company to move forward, as anyone can copy it. The actual method of grinding fecal matter is covered in another patent, but it is nowhere near effective as this one is.

Its too bad, this would be a cool unit to have. Maybe I’ll have to take a good look at the patent and build my own.