Mycroft, don't be too hasty. I remembered Eric and others working on this for a long time, and indeed with a little bit of searching I found an email Eric sent back in May 2009 linking to a page which led me to http://graverobbers.blogspot.com/search/label/brasil
In those articles, and in the email thread, he discusses running commands across multiple machines using methods which I believe are recognizable as multi-pipe like. This article predates your "time traveling". Let it go.
IBM employees are strongly encouraged to submit things for patents. You do something interesting, you write it up quickly and send it to the patent lawyers, they do the rest. Maybe eventually you find out it has been approved. I'm not saying it's good, but it's the IBM corporate culture and this is not an especially unusual situation.