The story confuses patents and copyrights. The guy might have copyrighted it, but given the goofy things that get patented these days, that’s not impossible either.

Johnson patents new softball throw

A Prattville [Alabama] native has patented a new pitch for softball.

Jerry Johnson grew up in Prattville and attended Autauga County High School. After gradation, he enlisted in the military and spent 26 years, retiring in 1993. During his military career he became interested in softball.

The final four years of his military service, Johnson was assigned to the U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion in Beckley, W.Va. After his retirement, he taught ROTC at Greenbrier West High School and became the head coach of the girls softball program. In 2003, he was hired as the pitching coach at Mountain State University.

While coaching women’s softball at Mountain State, one day Johnson was playing around with different grips and release points in the pitching room at MSU.

“Pitching in the backstop, you release the ball and kind of look at it. It’s hard to do, but one night I noticed the ball had a different spin on it, a different rotation. The ball stays knee high, has a very slight curve and a very, very slight drop. The speed is between a fastball and change-up. It’s a good off-speed pitch. It has two different grips and two different releases. The spin/rotation of the ball is what makes the pitch,” Johnson said.

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John predicted this sort of nonsense three years ago in his PC Magazine column!

I was the moderator for a Commonwealth Club debate between fabled Law Professor Larry Lessig and Todd Dickinson a couple of years ago. Dickinson was the director of the US Patent and Trademark Office under Clinton and a huge promoter of the idea that business models should be patented. From what I could tell, he thought everything should be patented. So I asked him if a football play could be patented. He said probably not, since there had to be something technological about it to qualify. “But what if this was a timing play?” I asked. My jaw dropped when he said it could probably get a patent! I was stunned at such an outrageous and stupefying notion. What can you say to a guy like this?