There’s an article in The Verge today entitled “Streaming services really want you to buy stuff while you watch TV”, which reminded me of some sage advice I often got from the late Clayton P. Knowles, Jr., Esq. (my first general counsel). He liked to say, “Great idea, Shelly. You know the difference between a rich genius and a broke genius? A broke genius is two years ahead of his time, a rich genius is six months ahead of his time.” Through the years, the phrase “great idea, Shelly” came to mean “let’s not do this right now.” I really miss Clay.
In the case of “clicking on Jennifer Aniston’s sweater,” alas, I was about 31 years ahead of my time. Since it took about four years to get the invention from idea to patent filing, call it 35 years. U.S. Patent 5,438,355 Interactive System for Processing Viewer Responses to Television Programming was filed on April 16, 1993. The patent filing predates the debut of the public web (April 30, 1993) by about two weeks. Clay was right, from a timing perspective – there was no way this was ever going to work out.
That said, I learned an enormous amount by thinking through the process and creating the original patent claims. It was a magical time. Back then, everything about the internet (and the soon-to-publicly-emerge world wide web) was exciting. It felt like now, when everything is new and we can tell we’re living on the exponential.
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Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.