I was going to mention the Harvey Reid Website--it's not really an altered tuning, of course, because the tuning stays standard. It really is a third hand thing.
Also, you can search the uspto.gov site, you need the alternatif plug-in for drawings, but they direct you to it. Many things have been tried, but then some on the market today were novel enough for utility patents. When I searched my fingerpicks, just to find out how to improve them, it turned out in all the hundreds of types, nobody had ever done anything remotely like mine. Go figure.