While perusing his site trying to find a good description of "talk-aloud" testing, I came across this little gem:

Patents
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20. Nielsen, J.: Method and apparatus for facilitating popup links in a hypertext-enabled computer system, U.S. Patent 6,373,502 (2002)
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What the f*ck?! A patent for popups? The most heinous user-interface abomination known to usability professionals worldwide, patented?! By Jakob Nielsen?! What the hell is going on here?

Sadly, it appears to be true.

I don't like software patents to begin with; they seem like a rather sneaky way of awarding potentially massive royalties to someone based solely on the fact that they were the first to describe a programming hack, if not the first to actually do it. At my company, if we bothered to file a patent every time one of our programmers thought up a new, potentially useful way of hacking code, we'd never get anything done... and that's essentially the problem with software patents - there's so many useful and novel "inventions" of code being created every day that to try and patent each one of them would overwhelm the patent system entirely.

Oh, wait, that's already happened.

Well. If Jakob Nielsen has a patent on popups, then I think he has an obligation to enforce that patent, with the aim of either:

• Showing everyone exactly how evil he really is, by reaping millions of dollars from one of the Internet's most annoying "features"
• Forcing every pop-up ad vendor to pay such enormous licensing fees that they go out of business, thus ridding the Internet of one of its most annoying features.

I consider it a moral obligation, on his part.