Talk about hoarding the fruits of innovation! Talk about a juicy patent dispute! I know I should be chronicling cutting-edge fights over rights to nanotech devices, genomic tags or esoteric new software applications. But let's face it: an all high-tech diet can be hard to swallow. So on today's menu I'm serving up nothing but 100 percent pure, premium, not-from-concentrate Florida orange juice.

You see, something's gone sour in the orange grove. In an all-too-common tactic, Tropicana, a division of PepsiCo, is abusing the U.S. patent system to-please excuse the pun-put the squeeze on its competitors. And I'm convinced the case offers an important cautionary tale about innovation today.

People have been growing citrus in Florida's sun-drenched groves for a very long time, putting a lot of effort into caring for the trees and figuring out the most efficient ways to harvest the fruit. But making orange juice remains a fabulously straightforward process: you pick the ripest oranges you can and press the juice from them, just the way nature made it, adding nothing.