Matt Ulman

Thank you for protecting innovation with your lawyer army and Scrooge-McDuck-sized vault of gold.

I shudder to think of the world we might live in: a world where we mortals have discovered a way to highlight text on a page but haven’t taken the unobvious next step of adjusting that selection.  Thank you, Geniuses of Redmond, for discovering this strange and nearly mystical technology.

I’ll include your other innovations below for posterity, although my puny mind struggles to understand the nonobvious, substantial, and significant nature of these inventions.  In fact, I may go mad from the sudden expansion of my perspective.

Whatever you do, gentle reader, look away before reading about the way they’ve completely redefined the way we ‘annotate’ things:

The Microsoft-created features protected by the patents infringed by the Nook and Nook Color tablet are core to the user experience. For example, the patents we asserted today protect innovations that:

• Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;

• Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;

• Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;

• Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and

• Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.