Wednesday, May 21, 2003

I invented what? For who?

Today the mailman bought me a letter from the good old EU. Yes it was even address to "Etas-Unis D'Amerique". Its no wonder the USPS didn't toss it into the shredder before it reached me, but somehow it made it here. I was even more surprised to find it was from the European Patent Office. Okay so I've been listed as an inventor on patents a few times before so I figure one of them had made it to European Patent submittal. But wait, WTF is this?

Applicant/Proprietor: America Online, Inc.

It took me quite a while to figure out I had once worked on a project for a dot com customer and they ended up filing a patent on the technology I was working on listing me as one of the inventors. It turns out they ended up selling out to AOL and with them went my co-invention. So now AOL owns a patent that I invented and I'm blogging about it now just like any other asshole on-line inventor :-)

Does anyone know how to uninvent something?

No comments: