Suspension of disbelief, or things that make you go huh?

[Kilroy]

Sometimes SOD issues are with mundane matters, not the fantastic. There is a Buffy/Star Wars/Stargate Halloween multi-crossover story where the author uses a patent as a plot device to bring the Stargate characters into contact with the Buffy characters. The patent as described in the story would have been rejected and therefore in my opinion should not get the attention it gets in the story:
A.) You cannot patent part of an invention or an incomplete invention. The application as described is intentionally incomplete.
B.) The invention’s description matches the criteria USPTO uses to define a perpetual motion machine and no model was included. USPTO requires a working model to grant a patent for a perpetual motion machine.

 

That particular scene didn't trip my SOD for the patent issues--patent law's not something I have a lot of experience with--but it did strike me as a serious and oddly out-of-character dick move for the protagonist to do. That sort of "for your own good" bullshit never sat quite right with me, and for a character who was trying to keep their powers a secret just filing a patent on a bit of superscience seems weird on the face of it. But I can't say it broke my SOD, as that seems to have a higher than usual tensile strength.
 

It did seem to be a failure of strategic thinking. My question with that was also "How did Wolfram & Hart miss the patent?" when the engineer was researching the lightsaber that fell into their hands.