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BT's Hyperlinking Patent Refuted
parvati writes "According to a newscientist.com story a 1968 Stanford University film demonstrating the use of the first mouse may be used to refute BT's claim of a 1976 patent on hyperlinks. In the film the mouse is used to click on hyperlinks." I've got a patent pending on swallowing, oxidation, and chewing gum.
The hyperlink streaming video (realplayer req.)
I was surfing around, and came across this, www.xanadu.net They claim to have been using "hypertext" since the early 60's. Has anyone else heard of this?
In case of Emergency, Curl up in the Fetal position, and lick a Bible for comfort!
Prof. Ted Nelson is the guy who invented the modern concept of hyperlinks. He devoted his life and work to the idea of a pefectly designed global repository of hyperlinked objects. Unfortunately, the designed turned out to be a white elephant; OTOH, when the WWW was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, it was just poor and broken enough that the worse-is-better gang who runs things would adopt it as a suitable lowest common denominator. Nelson never got the recognition he deserved, and lost his funding. Finally, in 1998 (IIRC) he resorted to opening the existing sources of Xanadu software; it's now available as Udanax (here. Sadly, that seems to have gone nowhere either.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Free public debate between Jack Valenti and Lawrence Lessig: tonight at 7pm.
If you're in the Boston area, you can attend in person, or catch the webcast with realplayer.
~
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Hey,
/fpt/view.cgi?id=1 and put your name against software patents. I believe that patents really work against the industry as a whole and we do need to protest.
Admittedly I've just started this site, but the first petition I've set up is against software patents.
Go to http://freepetitions.com/cgi- bin
thenerd.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
Why be a dick about it? "It embarasses me"? No, your Mom dressing you like that embarasses you. Duplicate stories on slashdot do not embarass you.
Hooboy: this makes a lot of sense. Insult the people who do the talking and supply the good technical content on your site. Proofread your damm stories, check your facts, and remember this simple rule of capitalism: the customer is always right. You piss me off. You don't want to be known as a slashdot editor who pisses off customers, I can tell you that right now.
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Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
It's good that someone has proof that hyperlinking is really not a new idea. Of course people do it on the web today, and they did it in gopher, but as far as I'm concerned, references and footnotes in a paper do the same conceptual thing, as does the index in the back of a book, or the table of contents in the front. It does the same thing, too; it points you to a number (a link) where you can find the information on the subject (text of link). Then you follow the link (turn to the page) and read the linked information.
Asimov would often work in uses of hyperlinking in his stories; he was a big fan of it, and thought that if you had a machine that could track your eye movements, then if you stared at a word longer than necessary, it could make references pop up in the margins, and explain the subject. And that was a long time ago, and Asimov is dead now.
The only thing new about hyperlinking was the idea that you could somehow automate this process, but that's not new; people always want to automate things. I'm sure people have said for as long as books have been around in their current form: gee, it'd be nice if I already had this information I wanted on the page in front of me...
Yet another obvious implementation of a real world phenomenon that's unique now because it's on the net.
In the future, this will be abbreviated YAOIOARWPTUNBIOTN.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Apparently, you are the only one posting to the site this weekend. Take some time off. A week would do you good.
And when you get back consider instituting some kind of Quality Assurance program for the site. It's really getting sad to see all the redundant posts ... and the legitimate ones are OLD news once they get posted.
Note to the redundant.
This has already been pointed out.
In fact, there's a (+3, Funny) post making fun of this phenomena.
The only thing worse than redundant articles on slashdot are redundant posts about redundant articles on slashdot.
Please don't contribute to this frightening growing trend; come troll with the rest of us where it's safe and warm, and we make fun of slashdot for other, more wholesome reasons.
I'm patenting all annoying stories on Slashdot that have no consequential value. I figure I'll make a fortune.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I currently have a patent pending on a method for allowing other people to see the "source code" for a "software project" so that they may share the code and add to each other's work. It details that if they add to the project and release it, they must also release the alleged "source code."
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
Look at the amount of recycling it's doing; that's gotta be good for the nature, right?
BT's patents were granted in a dozen countries, but have lapsed after their 20-year lifespans. But for reasons that are not yet clear, the US patent application (US 4873662) was effectively only filed in 1986-and granted in 1989-and will remain in force until 2006.
This is no great mystery about this, and the remarks about a 1986 filing date are incorrect. The answer can be found on the face of the patent, or by checking ANY of the free on-line databases on the net.
U.S. Patent No. 4,873,662 issued on October 10, 1989. Under the applicable law at that time, the patent would be entitled to a 17-year term, which would end on October 10, 2006. (A few years back, the patent terms were changed to twenty years from date of filing, rather than seventeen years from the date of issue. However, the then-existing patents were grandfathered to the longer of the two possible terms).
The effective filing date of the patent, however, is not 1986, but to the contrary 7/12/1977. Accordingly, the critical date for invalidating prior art would be 7/12/1976. (Although a 1968 film, if it were in fact published about that time, or demonstrated legitimate, non-experimental, public use, sale or offer for sale of the invention, could beat that handily).
While the particular application that matured into the '662 patent was filed on August 15, 1980, that application was a continuation of an earlier application, Ser. No. 814,922, which was filed on the earlier date. The effective filing date of a continuation, if properly filed, is the date of the parent application -- even if the previous application was later abandoned.
Yup. The story is here. I can't belive that they're repeating strories only three days after original post. Ridiculous!
"You will only be remembered for two things: the problems you solve or the ones you create." Mike Murdock
Sorry, it's not enough to simply say "I hereby patent this". You have to actually file for a patent with the patent office, a process which costs money.
If I had the money, I would file for a patent on patents. With the current state of the patent office they would probably grant the patent, as long as the language used in the application was sufficiently technical and obscure.
Force all these patent fiends to buy licences from me. That would be cool. By denying licences to those patents I didn't like I could become a really powerful dictator. All the suits would ph33r me. I could make them beg and kneel and worship and send me gifts of computer hardware and women and stuff. Heh. That would be cool.
Did I mention how cool that would be? Someone send me money to file, 'cuz it would be cool.
Has slashdot grown so large that there are perhaps too many people with the ability to post stories? Or does it need someone "at the top" to make sure duplicates like this don't get through? Is slashdot so big that it just can't be managed by anybody? I hope not, but I'm really curious; what's breaking down so much that this keeps happening?
Maybe we can have some constructive discussion instead of the regular round of "slashdot's gone downhill" talk. To CmdrTaco and the rest: We know you're all busy. But can you work this out?
-schussat
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I want to start a company whose sole business plan is to find the inane, everyday occurances that haven't been patented yet, (for example, masturbation) and just attack all people/companies that use them.
I'd suggest adding the proviso that you take these inane, everyday things and put "cyber-" "hyperlinked" or "web-based" in front of every third or fourth word. History suggest that then the idea is guaranteed to be genuinely novel and patentworthy even if it were banal to begin with. (E.g., "One-click shopping (tm)" which is little more than a "cyber-vending machine").
Patent your business model and also patent the process of copying or adapting the patented business model of another business. This should give you plenty of legal protection and meta-protection from your competitors. Your VCs will marvel at your acumen.
Taco, I have a patent for snide observations and sarcasm on the Internet. Why do you think that a tag has never made its way into HTML? I won't let W3C use it! NAH! You owe me big.
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-- Geof F. Morris
Time for another CueCat story! I'll see what I can drum up in the next few days. :)
-M
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I have a patent on posting redundant patent stories on Slashdot!! You will be hearing from my attorney shortly.
In this video, Doug Engelbart demonstrates cross references, which he even calls hyper links. Goodbye patent!
This 'oxidation' infringes on patent number 623326 for our product 'Rust'
Well, your patent number (623326) infringes on my patent (123321) on having patent numbers that are palindromes.
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Well, just yesterday (The day before? They all get blurred...) they repeated the Sony Airboard post so quickly, they both showed up on the front page together!
I think they're getting old... I mean, c'mon, how can you expect anyone over twenty-five to stay sharp? Why do you think there are so many script-kiddies, but no script-adulties, huh?
Why would a patent like this help anyone? How would anyone make money off of a hyperlink patent? are they going to start charging people to make hyperlinks? Are they going to get paid-per-click?
If that is the case...Amazon's patented one click technology will actually be worth something...
The anti-salmon
We (I) do - but they get rejected since they sometimes are about _competitors_ to Palm/Linux doing cool things. Which is, of course, forbidden here at Slashdot.
it's in my head
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Has anyone heard about that Airboard thingy?
Oh wait...