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Good. This will mean they should have less time for suing people using frames in websites, erm, I mean "Structured Document Viewer".

That's the way it sounds to me, especially after reading a link I saw in another post about a site that received this letter. The contents of that letter would actually be quite funny, if it weren't so serious. SBC seems to believe that because they sent this letter the only decision Museum Tour has left is which license to purchase. SBC is even nice enough to tell Museum Tour how much money they'll owe... just as soon as Museum Tour sends SBC a copy of their 2002 revenues.

This basically means that any well designed web site is in violation of this patent (consistancy is part of web design 101, right?). Frames, SSI, CGI, PHP, etc. only help designers violate this patent.

I almost wish I was an SBC customer... I'd love to call and cancel some service from them right now.

Looking at the original letter on museumtour, I couldn't help noticing a telephone number on the letter. I'm a bit worried by all this patent nonsense. Phoning up the lawyers for a bit of clarification might be helpful.

Now how many people read /. ?

Not that I'm suggesting anything. That would be bad.

...or did the rest of you that actually read the patents notice that they spend much more time talking about the browser itself than the navigation issues. The navigation stuff is actually mentioned in the document, but the majority of it is simply describing "browser.exe" and how it works in displaying this information...as in they appear to almost patent the way it is displayed on screen, but not the actual use of navigational elements. Also, from the rather vague wording they are using in the letter (also in the patents link above) it seems that just having your navigational links visually seperated from the main body of the site (ie. FRAMES or not) is still something they are going after. Maybe it's just me reading it wrong (which is entirely possible) but it just seems like this lawsuit simply isn't going to stand up in court and neither will any other ones if they are of the same nature. (Just my 10 cents.)

-Adam

The letter suggests that any website which has static, linked information (top banners, menus, bottom banners) which are displayed while other sections of the page are displayed as non-static (the area where products appear on most websites) infringes upon the patents they hold.

Doesn't that pretty much cover ALL websites?

From Museum Tour

"The letter suggests that any website which has static, linked information (top banners, menus, bottom banners) which are displayed while other sections of the page are displayed as non-static (the area where products appear on most websites) infringes upon the patents they hold."

And indeed, Museum Tour is being sued and does not use frames. Thus nearly any site that uses templates is subject to litigation.

I was reading the letter on museumtour.com and SBC makes lots of references to frames.

The specifically mention the document frame over and over.

On a side note, maybe we can blame SBC for frames!!

The letter to museumstore specifically lists claim 13 of the later patent. Here is claim 13:

13. A browser for navigating a document comprising a plurality of sections, the browser comprising:
a display window displaying a document; and
a user interface comprising a plurality of selectors automatically configured to correspond to a respective plurality of sections of the document regardless of what section of the document is being displayed in the display window;
wherein the plurality of selectors are not part of the document displayed in the display window of the browser and continue to be displayed after one of the plurality of selectors is selected.

The thing is, the claim covers a browser. Museumstore doesn't make a browser. IE, Netscape, Mozilla, etc. are browsers. I'd have to look more closely at the patent to see what they mean by "browser."

However, looking at the letter sent to museumtour, it looks like they patented frames in which one frame has navigational information. So no one had frames before 1996?

Anyway, here is the letter itself and here is the obscene pricing scale for using navigation bars. I'm having a hard time thinking of a site that DOESN'T use a unified navigation interface...

Anyway, here is the letter itself and here is the obscene pricing scale for using navigation bars. I'm having a hard time thinking of a site that DOESN'T use a unified navigation interface...

Well, that's ok: very few sites use HTML, but rather use a HTML-like language commonly refered to as tag soup.

http://www.museumtour.com/ claims to use HTML 4.01 Transitional, but even a quick glace at the header shows two closing HEAD tags; hence they're not using "a predefined structure [that conforms] to the Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML)."

We received a 40 page package from SBC Intellectual Property today informing us that our web site - which has links on the left side that go to other web pages within the site - but does not lose the left side navigation links - was in violation of their "Structured Document Browser" Patent.