Author here, or as they say, “Principal Inventor”. This started out as an Easter Egg John and I put into Facebook Chat in 2012. It was very simple: if you typed the ID of a Facebook object in double brackets, like [[zuck]], it would display Zuck's profile photo instead.

Months later Reddit found the egg, and did all sorts of fun things with it like construct composite troll faces from strategically-placed profile photos. It even made the tech news rounds on what had to have been a very slow news day.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/24/a-christmas-miracle-faceboo...

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/np3qi/you_can_make_rage...

The lawyers said they wanted to see me. Not to pat me down before being escorted off the premises. No. They wanted to get the details in order to file for a patent!

I could not refuse. My employment contract said I was to make reasonable effort to assist in the creation of patent applications that resulted from my work. I've done a lot of stuff I'm proud of. But it seemed that my landmark contribution to human knowledge was going to be what TechCrunch dubbed "extended rageface support".

So when the lawyers asked me to provide illustrations of “example uses", I did the only reasonable thing. It was the first and probably last time that a troll face was relevant in a patent.