Sorry, but I'm going to be "that guy", because someone is inevitably going to say "you can't patent that!", and there is generally a lot of misinformation about

Sorry, but I'm going to be "that guy", because someone is inevitably going to say "you can't patent that!", and there is generally a lot of misinformation about patents on HN. That particular document is a published patent application, and not a granted patent. You can tell on Google Patents in the field on the right that says: "Publication type: Application". Moreover, using USPTO Pair[0], you can check the status of such patents, and it turns out that this one has been abandoned since 2011 for failure to respond to the Patent Examiner. So no, there is no patent on this (at least, not the one you pointed to). [0] Publicly available database by USPTO: http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair