For every innovation, there’s someone that wants to capitalize on it

And, there’s some gov­ern­ment agency that enables said capitalization.

For exam­ple, take U.S. patent No. 7,000,180. While it was orig­i­nally filed back in 2001 (well before AJAX became the “acronym du jour”), it was finally granted this Valentine’s Day by the beloved U.S Patent Office … and it could well screw up web tech­nol­ogy inno­va­tion as we know it, as it’s broad enough to (poten­tially) require any AJAX-like tech­nol­ogy to pay a license fee back to the patent owner.

Bril­liant … just bloody brilliant.

So, what do we learn from this? Simple:

• Patent every­thing. Then, even if you have no suc­cess your­self, you can sti­fle every­one else’s.
• Tech­nol­ogy isn’t about think­ing out­side the box. It’s about who has the most legal paper­work on file.