a) (parassite patents) You are a little technology company with no product, no production line, no customers, and a useless 15 year old patent on something that now can be considered, in some ways, similar to a new hot product. Or, you are a mid-size technology company with lots of employees, no bleeding edge product, waning customers and scared stock holders ready to dump you and their stock, and a useless 15 year old patent on something that now can be considered, in some ways, similar to a new hot product. So you exploit the new hot technology you did nothing to create and deliver, and ask the producer of the new hot product for compensation based on the patent.

b) (aggressive patents) you are a mid-size or large technology company, and are developing a new hot product on some bleeding edge technology. Only, the idea is so minimal that you are afraid that, by technical sophistication alone, you will not be able to hold a significant part of the market and that competitors will be fast to implement and deliver a product that is just as good and possible better than yours. So you file a patent and prevent anyone to work in the field, or ask the competitors for compensation.

c) (defensive patents) you are a large/very large technology company, who is sick and tired to pay small, mid-size and largish failing companies for parassite and/or aggressive patents, and thus decide that, regardless of obviousness, you will patent every single stupid idea that you are going to put in a product, just because it’s cheaper this way. Once you have the patent, you know you will never really enforce it, because the court will immediately find the obviousness of the patent. Yet, you still ask for it because you will prevent other companies to sue you.

Now ask yourself: where do you place Microsoft in this arena? Of course this is a defensive patent: Microsoft has enough strength to place a product and have it sell regardless of competition and actual technological sophistication: just look at PowerPoint, which is by far a weak product, and yet through mechanisms other than patent litigation has become the de facto standard for presentations.

So, now, cool down. Nobody will come after you if you create a good product mixing up video shows and chats. But you won’t be able to ask money to Microsoft for the idea.

there’s already previous art on this. not like they hardly ever play music videos on MTV, but on TRL (total request live) people post IM-style comments in real time on that show.

I rarely have the opportunity to do this, but I’ve witnessed prior art for this “invention.” If you have G4TV folks, tune to it while “Trek 2.0” is playing, it’s TOS just in case you are wondering. On the screen chat, stats about the episode, and the “Spock Market” are displayed.