I mentioned the Facebook concept. It was obviously a concept that occurred pretty much simultaneously to a whole bunch of people across the world. The same is t

I mentioned the Facebook concept. It was obviously a concept that occurred pretty much simultaneously to a whole bunch of people across the world. The same is true for h.264; it's a system for compressing video that is convenient for 21st century media. There are many, many variations on that same concept. It's the concept of 'multiple independent discovery' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery. Just because somebody got around to patenting a concept first doesn't mean that many others didn't think of it at the same time. You probably know how it is - many people have the seed of an idea, several will take it further than that, a handful might get to the stage of implementation - but only a couple will make it to the point of success.