Thought the peanut butter sandwich patent was a joke? That one doesn't even register a chuckle compared to a patent recently granted to Amazon.com. The e-commerce giant now can claim a legal monopoly on the process of photographing people and things against a white backdrop.

The patent, issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office, is making some folks in the photography community do a double-take. Amazon’s patent, called Studio Arrangement, details a specific arrangement of elements in a photography studio that the company believes helps foster the production of the most aesthetically pleasing images.

The white-backdropped photo and video studio layout, which looks and sounds similar to basically every other photo studio in existence, includes: "A front light source aimed at a background, an image capture position located between the background and the front light source, an elevated platform positioned between the image capture position and the background, and at least one rear light source positioned between the elevated platform and the background."

The patent, granted in March, even describes the use of a table: "A subject can be photographed and/or filmed on the elevated platform to achieve a desired effect of a substantially seamless background where a rear edge of the elevated platform is imperceptible to an image capture device positioned at the image capture position." (Look out yearbook pictures everywhere.)

The company offers plenty of technical details for a process that basically consists of turning on some lights at various angles, adding a table to elevate the subject being shot, and setting the subject in front of a white backdrop. For example, the arrangement includes:

A background comprising a white cyclorama; a front light source positioned in a longitudinal axis intersecting the background, the longitudinal axis further being substantially perpendicular to a surface of the white cyclorama; an image capture position located between the background and the front light source in the longitudinal axis, the image capture position comprising at least one image capture device equipped with an eighty-five millimeter lens, at least one image capture device further configured with an ISO setting of about three hundred twenty and an f-stop value of about 5.6;

The purpose of such an arrangement, Amazon explains, is to achieve various photographic effects without requiring lots of post-production work or green screens. The company describes that this process enables a photographer to "achieve the effect noted above without any image manipulation due to the particular arrangement of the subject, camera, lighting, and background.”

The patent also details a specific work-flow process (illustrated, right).

Whether this process is overbroad or fails to meet the legal requirements for patent eligibility is subject to a debate that will likely be ongoing. But as things currently stand, Amazon now appears to have control over yet another area of the commercial marketplace should it choose to wield such power.

Neither Amazon nor the USPTO were available for comment on Thursday morning.