How To Patent A Magic Trick

So here’s the thing — I started writing about all the different ways to protect your magic tricks, and it ended up being a long and confusing post. This is a reader requested topic I didn’t believe I had much to write on. It turns out I was wrong, and I have a lot of experience protecting magic for the performers and businesses I have worked for.

Let me start by saying that I often see magicians in Facebook groups talk about why patenting a magic trick is impossible. They are wrong.

My experience is not something I want to share publicly. There’s a reason magicians who successfully protect their magic tricks do not want to discuss how and why they did it openly. Sharing all the ways you’ve protected your home from robberies is equally unwise.

But, in this closed newsletter, I feel reasonably comfortable sharing the details.

Patenting magic tricks is expensive, and it is rarely financially worthwhile, which is why I rarely advise it.

My Notebook

When I was nineteen years old, my notebook was stolen from inside my production managers car. It contained methods for the upcoming Dynamo: Seeing is Believing arena tour. Shit.

It turned out that the insurers of said tour needed to be called and notified of the robbery. The tour producers told me that they must do this in case the multi-million-pound tour incurred a financial loss, and I felt pretty terrible. Since then, my notebooks are a mess that no one but myself can understand.

This was the first time I realised the gravity of financial losses linked to unprotected magic for famous magicians.

I later learned about Yigal Mesika and the success of his patented and trademarked Loops. This was when I realised how protecting magic plays a role within the magic industry too.

I’m going to write about other ways to protect magic later in the year. These include time-stamping, NDA’s, copyright and trademarks.

Btw, trademarking is what you should be looking into if your trick is an illusion. It’s incredibly affordable, less than £300 in the UK, I believe, and your trick's design is integral to the method, which it often is with illusions; it’ll protect you just fine. This is similar to how Pepsi and Coke trademark their bottle shapes.

If you can believe it, my first lockdown was spent in a legal dispute with Toys R Us over a trademark issue…

Patenting a Trick

Do not listen to the Facebook magicians. If you want to protect your trick, speak to a professional. You will be surprised at the many ways you can protect the trick.

Several years ago, I released a trick to the magic community. The first run of the product was going to cost well over a hundred thousand dollars. This was after seven months of negotiating the price down and calling in a lot of favours.

Staring at that big number, we considered the impact a copycat might have on our ability to break even. Then we considered the likelihood that a magician might try to steal some of the product's success, and then we decided to protect ourselves.

Our patent attorney specialises in magic tricks and toys. We met him a few days before the trick went on pre-order. We hoped to raise enough money from the pre-order to fund half of the first run and fund the rest ourselves.

Oh, I feel like I skipped over that key aspect. Our attorney specialised in magic tricks. They’ve successfully patented several magic tricks over the last twenty years. His office wall was nothing but shelves proudly displaying a wide range of toys, board games, magic tricks and the occasional sex toy.

There’s a bunch of nonsense involved in patents. They’re cheaper in different countries, for example. If you don’t want other magicians to find them, you can list them under a family member’s name (often done by big magicians). You can actually patent the use of an object. So an object that’s readily used for one thing can now be patented for the use of a magic trick. Weird, eh.

You can be smart about it, and when it’s not possible to patent the product itself, like, say, a hoop of invisible thread, you can instead patent every possible way to store and package said hoop of thread.

You don’t need to reveal the method of your trick if another essential part of the trick can be patented instead. And, of course, as I said earlier, a patent might not be your best bet over something like a trademark.

Here’s where it gets fascinating, and it’s where magic and toys collide.

You can choose to apply for a full patent or a patent-pending status.

Patent-pending basically means you’ve told the world, hey guys, we created this, and it’s ours… we just need a little bit longer to collect all the documents proving such.

When you later apply and are granted a full patent, the full patent is timestamped to the date of the patent-pending application. This means you are protected from the date of your patent-pending application.

So, if I release a magic trick that’s clearly labelled “patent-pending” on the product page and packaging, and then someone releases a copy. Then many months later, I apply and am granted a full patent… the person who copied me is very liable, even though they copied me when it was only patent-pending.

The nice thing about patent-pending is the bar is pretty low for what gets given that status. You could likely get patent-pending for most existing objects “use for a magic trick.” It’s also relatively cheap to apply for patent-pending status. If you know you want the full patent, it’s cheaper to apply for that in one go, though.

The Toy Industry and Joao Miranda will apply for patenting-pending on all of their products and never apply for the full patent. They might do this because the first twelve months are the most financially unstable time for a new product, where you might not yet have broken even (recovered your losses), and competition is at its highest.

Copies of your toy or trick will likely be released in the first year. Think back to the waves of clear prediction boxes. One type of trick being popular and repeatedly copied and released for a set period of time is common in magic.

A patent-pending might put off individuals, who are then in a tricky situation. To proceed with copying you, they then need to make a bet on whether:

1. Your patent will one day be granted when you apply.

2. You will actually apply for the patent.

There’s actually a time limit between patent-pending and when you must apply for the full patent. And patent-pending status is zero indication that you’ll actually be granted one. I know this because I’ve watched Dragon’s Den (Shark Tank) and seen the investors roll their eyes at a pitcher’s patent-pending status.

If you find this interesting, I recommend the free substack, Patent Drop, which shares the most interesting patent-pending applications of the week, like this week’s PayPal application to patent the ability to tag objects in augmented reality. So if you walk past a bike, you’ll see it’s for sale in AR and be able to buy it there and then.

Anyways, we were given patent-pending status the day before we released the trick.

We later included that fact in several letters which successfully put a stop to copies of our product in the first year.

We applied for the full patent a year later. We mostly did this to set a precedent so that copycats would take patent-pending labels seriously on any future products. Copy cats would often reply to letters saying you’re clearly never going to apply for the full patent, and we quite liked the idea of no one ever saying that again for future products.

A few weeks after being granted the full patent, I got a call from a Britain’s Got Talent producer, saying that someone had performed the trick on the show and they wanted our permission to use it in the show. We said no — it had been a core value of the business that it withheld TV rights. I’m a strong believer that most magic is better for the everyday performer if the audience has not already seen it performed on BGT.

We felt that it’s in the best interests of the larger group of magicians who spent hundreds of dollars on a trick to feel like the only person in the world performing it… than one of those magicians getting to perform it on telly.

Some magicians disagreed. An average of three magicians per month emailed wanting to perform the trick on a Got Talent. We’d politely say no, and then they’d try to convince us to change our minds by telling us millions of people would see the trick, and it would be great exposure.

I think they missed that this was exactly the reason why we didn’t want it on there.

The BGT producer called three more times asking permission and then emailed to tell us they were going to air it without our permission because their legal team didn’t feel they needed it. Shit.

They changed their mind three days later when they received a letter outlining all the lengths we’d gone to protect the trick, including the patent.

They actually cut it out of the show the day it was due to air on a Saturday.

Having worked on TV, that’s wild.

If it had gone to court, perhaps we would not have won. But we made it objectively clear that we had a history of investing in protecting the trick and that we had every intention to continue doing so. We valued the trick more than they did.

There’s no proven way to protect a trick every time. This is simply my experience and one of the many ways we effectively protected ours.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Yigal Mesika, who has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect a loop of thread with patents, trademarks, cease and desists, mediation and rights agreements… it’s that you really can protect any magic trick.

In fact, Yigal’s core business model is not selling Loops — it’s protecting them.

Finally, let me say that ideas are worthless, and the mere fact you had one proves that anyone else could. I’m only an advocate for protecting something if you could incur a financial loss without doing so.

For the most part, competition is healthy.

If you have any questions, comment, and I’ll reply for everyone to see. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled fun-loving creativity and ideas post next week. Just trying to tick off all the reader requested stories. Let me know if there’s something you want me to write about.

And super finally, I am no longer affiliated with the product I reference in this post and have not worked on it for several years. Though I continue to be listed as its inventor, I no longer own the rights. Peace and love, and don’t sue me x.