Google users have long noticed the search page's "doodles", where Google redesigns their logo as an homage to something having to do with that day's history (Yes! I managed to link to a Techdirt story from two-thousand-and-freaking-two! Beat that, other Techdirt writers!). Often times these are nods to the birthdays of famous or important artists, scientists, or other historical figures and holidays. And if you have spent the past week or so living on Earth and aren't a rock, you can probably guess what these past days' doodles have been about.

But, as reader Jason writes in to note, the big Goog is apparently chilly on actually, you know, mentioning what the drawings are for when you roll over the image:

"The image url reference[d] the "opening ceremony" of something. But the tooltip for the image, which any seasoned Google user knows will tell you what's up with the logo that day, simply reads, "Hooray for sports!"

The two theories Jason came up with are that the search giant is afraid to even mention the sporting event in question for fear of reprisal by the committee that oversees said sporting event, or it's a sly poke in the eye at their overly aggressive sue-happy nature. Lord knows if the-games-that-shall-not-be-named are willing to go after gyro shops, a more prominent target like Google would seem to be a no-brainer. Now, it would seem to me that a prominent page like Google's home search page featuring the Olym...games-that-shall-not-be-named would be a great source of publicity for the sporting event, but thanks to the chilling effect created through lawsuit happy committees, that publicity is lost.

As far as I know, Google has never sued nor even threatened anyone else with a patent infringement claim (if anyone knows of any, let me know). The company does file for a fair number of patents, but so far it seems to be focused on using them for defensive purposes. However, as a bunch of folks are submitting, the company has now received a patent on the "invention" of changing your logo for special events. Yes, the concept of Google Doodles is now patented. The patent itself, 7,912,915, took nearly 11 years to get approved, but it still got approved. The claims are pretty short, but here's the key one:

A non-transitory computer-readable medium that stores instructions executable by one or more processors to perform a method for attracting users to a web page, comprising: instructions for creating a special event logo by modifying a standard company logo for a special event, where the instructions for creating the special event logo includes instructions for modifying the standard company logo with one or more animated images; instructions for associating a link or search results with the special event logo, the link identifying a document relating to the special event, the search results relating to the special event; instructions for uploading the special event logo to the web page; instructions for receiving a user selection of the special event logo; and instructions for providing the document relating to the special event or the search results relating to the special event based on the user selection.

I'm hoping that Google and Sergey Brin (who's the named inventor) are planning to use this patent to demonstrate just how ridiculous the patent system is these days. And people were just insiting that the USPTO's new faster approval patent process had safeguards to stop bad patents from getting through. Yeah. Right.