You cannot patent a foldable coat hanger. The only thing she could patent is the specific mechanism she used to enable folding, but I doubt the copycats would use exactly the same design.
Sure you can patent a folding coat hanger, in fact someone did recently in granted US patent US1139964B2 [0].
If you look at the claim, which defines the scope of the monopoly, you'll see it is very long. That is because folding coat hangers were already invented and reinvented many times over. Some example published applications would be US4997115A [1], US5632422A.
I've not looked at the OP yet, but I'd be surprised if they had a new invention in this space; possible of course.
A lot of these things don't make it to be products because they're too expensive for the utility they provide.
>You can't do that IIRC, because it is based on prior art in the public domain. Just like you can't patent a chair with 5 legs.
A point she made in the video (and at least partially confirmed by a quick patent search by me) is that there really isn't one of these in the prior art.
> There's also no reason to patent that many things for the same thing. You only need to be sufficiently vague to how it folds.
As far as patents are concerned, those are the same. Getting a patent broad enough to cover all her embodiments of the invention is the same as getting a patent that covers all the prototypes. In the US you get up to three "free" independent claims per patent application, that can cover different approaches that are non-overlapping. But they can't be addressed to different inventions. In other words, you can get a single patent on three reasonable variations of a folding coat hanger and slight variations thereof. You cannot get a single patent that covers a folding coat hanger, and precision timing device, and a popcorn maker.
> The only thing she could patent is the specific mechanism she used to enable folding
Have only had a brief look at the video but the folding mechanism looks like the standard figure-of-8 rubber things that join the various parts of folding clothes dryers (eg. [0] from John Lewis) - which makes sense! It's a proven design!
