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BT claims to hold patent on hyperlinking

Not Here Still

11:31 / 09.02.02

Imagine if one company held the right to collect a fee each time an Internet user clicked on a Web site link and jumped to another Web page.

It may sound far-fetched, but a U.S. federal court will hear preliminary arguments next week to determine if this most elemental of Internet activities is the business property of a lone company, protected in the form of a patent.

BT Group believes it holds such a patent covering "hypertext links" — the illuminated text on a Web page that enables users to surf from page to page with the click of a mouse. On Monday, BT will go to court to try to cash in on it.

edited to add a response: Bloody hell...

[ 09-02-2002: Message edited by: Not Me Again ]

Spatula Clarke

12:45 / 09.02.02

Even if it's found that they do own the patent to hyperlinking, policing its use will prove impossible.

Fist Fun

15:07 / 09.02.02

Very interesting. This first came to light about a year and a half ago.
It doesn't seem they have a very strong case though because there seems to be a lot of evidence of prior art. Details of thsi in the article.
It seems they could actually enforce a charge though. It would be levied on ISPs.
What this really highlights is the problem of patents and how they can dampen innovation and invention.

sleazenation

09:11 / 10.02.02

I didn't think its open for debate that BT had pioneered the techniques that made hyperlinks possible and at one point held the world wide patent for them, unfortunately they had allowed those patents to lapse in most territories ... except for America IIRC...

Fist Fun

09:11 / 10.02.02

quote:I didn't think its open for debate

Well it is very much open for debate. For instance this film showing hyperlinks being used in 1968 (link from article above). This kinda proves prior art.
Besides that I am not sure what is so unfortunate about BT allowing the patent to lapse. What exact value would be derived from BT cashing in on this?

Magic Mutley

09:11 / 10.02.02

Seems to be very good arguments for prior - check this presentation at Stanford Research Institute from 1968.

Engelbart 1968 Demo
More info

I think IBM had a system as well.

Just found this which doubts that BT's patent even covers hyperlinking...

Wankers.

[ 10-02-2002: Message edited by: Wheaty-G ]

Sleeperservice

10:11 / 10.02.02

I have a fairly dim view of patenting stuff like this. I worked for a small networking company in the early 80's (Compunet in the UK) which was sort of like a pre-WWW in that it had a client browser & custom protocols etc (most stuff was Teletype in those days). I was a C programmer and wrote a lot of the server software myself, including an implementation of, you guessed it, hyperlinks. I'd never seen hyperlinks before but just thought they'd be a useful idea. But I'm sure the idea was thought of by loads of other people too. S'no big deal.

So I guess my point is, has patenting gone mad? Even the most trival things get patented/copyrighted which is just silly. Even the most signigicant things get patented/copyrighted, our DNA, which is scarey. All this driven by, you guessed again, money.

Perhaps some sort of open licencing system would be better? Something like the Open Source community but for ideas...

odd jest on horn

11:43 / 10.02.02

it used to be that you could only patent the actual implementation of an idea. what happened to that? i mean i don't neccessarily agree with that being a good idea either, but at least it's somewhere near the sensible end of the spectrum.

Magic Mutley

17:09 / 10.02.02

quote:Originally posted by Sleeperservice:

So I guess my point is, has patenting gone mad? Even the most trival things get patented/copyrighted which is just silly.

Makes me think there aught to be a 'fucking obvious' challenge to patents: a patent should be invalid if it's 'fucking obvious'. Like hyperlinks aren't rocket science - they're just an extension of the idea of a quoting a reference (as in a reference in a published paper)

Difficult to quantify tho'

[ 10-02-2002: Message edited by: Wheaty-G ]

sleazenation

10:58 / 11.02.02

In a related story a charity has bought the copyright to read slated chips in an effort to show how idiotically unworkable the current system of bio-patents is

read all about it here

Spatula Clarke

11:23 / 11.02.02

quote:Originally posted by odd jest on horn:
it used to be that you could only patent the actual implementation of an idea. what happened to that? i mean i don't neccessarily agree with that being a good idea either, but at least it's somewhere near the sensible end of the spectrum.

That's treading towards the thorny area of intellectual properties. There are cases where the idea behind something is as important as the implementation. Copyright law has to be able to protect individuals or groups from having their ideas stolen. It's in where you draw the line and how you define the law with regards to IP that the difficulties arise.

It could, I suppose, be argued that hyperlinking is a massively important part of communication in this century. In that case, does any one company deserve to own the rights to its use?

There's a (very) slight parallel to the copyrighting of medicines here.

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