I blame the lawyers

This is pretty amusing although more the Ars article than the fact that the patent for online document sharing was actually granted to Xerox:

There are probably hundreds of pieces of prior art that could be found for an essentially simple idea. The one highlighted in Ranieri’s article, and pictured above, is a library circulation card. That’s a pretty old system of, well, sharing physical documents within a network.

I blame the lawyers.

Read the full Ars Technica titled “What’s stupid this month: Xerox patents sharing documents online”