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British Telecom's Hyperlink Claims To Reach U.S. Court
downundarob writes: "Last year, BT said it had discovered that it holds U.S. patent 4,873,662 for the invention of hyperlink technology used on the Internet, and on Dec. 13, 2000, the London-based telecommunication company filed suit in federal court in White Plains, New York. A court date was set Monday in the lawsuit brought by British Telecommunications PLC (BT) against U.S.-based Prodigy Communications Corp. for patent infringement through the ISP's (Internet service provider) unauthorized use of the hyperlink. The full story is here."
Before you all get started, please don't assume that we brits support this in any way, shape or form. Every self-respecting British geek despises BT for their obstructive approach to broadband internet provision. At every possible stage they have dragged their feet in an effort to keep competitors out. A few years ago their chairman made a speech in which he claimed that the internet was still not "fit for purpose". Of course, the "purpose" he had in mind was making billions for BT. This patent claim is just another attempt by BT to make money with having to compete fairly with other organizations.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
since hyperlinks are simply the "mechanization" of references. Think of footnotes as prior art here. And what is a list of phone numbers printed in a book, relative to a set of linked email addresses? But one shudders to see the means of most web based communications and commerce subjected to the arcane and so finely split hairs of legaldom.
Is it me or didn't Arthur C. Clark, also father of the geostationary satellite, describe something that can be seen as hyperlinks, in his novel 2001 A space odyssey, more precisely on the orbital station around the earth ? can't check myself, I lent the book to a friend some years ago.
I've got a copy of Ted Nelson's 1974/1987 two-sided book "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" on my desk that includes a section about his "Xanadu Project" which not only talks about hyperlinks, but also micropayments and "Xanadu stands" (basically internet cafes).
Even if all of the Xanadu stuff was written in 1987 (and it wasn't), wouldn't that be prior art for this 1989 patent?
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
BT are nearly bankrupt with billions of pounds in debt. How are they trying to deal with this? They sold off their overseas investments, for one. Their profitable overseas investments (as opposed to their highly unprofitable UK phone service). The only thing they've got going for them right now is BT Wireless which brings in huge revenues, primarily because the UK is entirely mobile-phone crazy. Sending text-messages seems to be the national obsession. Of course, they're spinning that off into a seperate company.
The local loop is bleeding them to death. Is this similar to the cut-throat competition that the North American telecoms have come up against over the past few years? Not likely. BT still charge per minute for local calls, as a rule. The competition is so meek, they're hardly noticable.
What's the problem then? Incompetance. Both managerial and technical incompetance on a grand scale in every department, at every level. Would anyone be sad to see them go? They've spent years trying to enforce the status quo and crush new technology to maintain their monopoly (you thought Microsoft was bad? Hah!), and bear a significant responsability for the slow uptake of the internet in the UK. No, not many people would be sad to see them go.
It all comes back to this, though. They're so desperate for cash right now, they'll try anything.
Despite the fact that there is both tons of 'prior art' and a very strong case of 'obvious nature' for this particular patent case, I think it would be interesting if BT did manage to win their case. They're hoping to claim massive amounts of royalties from companies who run websites, but I think the real effect would be that the majority of website owners, corporate and private, would simply terminate their websites.
I think that if you kill hyperlinks, you pretty much kill the whole http-based World Wide Web.
Where does that leave us? Well, for starters, it gets a whole lot of companies back *off* the internet, where they don't really belong. I think that the last decade has proven that the e-commerce model doesn't really work when brick-and-mortar sales models are more efficient. There are a few, very specialized business who manage to do business over the internet, but these are almost always in the same area that phone and mail-order business have always dominated. The major auto manufacturers are a good example of companies who don't belong on the internet. The music industry is probably another good case, since they absolutely refuse to embrace the sharing model that the internet and P2P apps have made so popular. They don't want to do business on the internet. They want to use the internet to make their brick-and-mortar businesses more profitable.
So, let's say that all these companies get off the internet. What's left of the internet?
E-Mail, for one. Despite the popularity of the web, E-Mail still accounts for the vast majority of internet traffic. FTP is another. Just because graphical websites go away doesn't mean that we can expect FTP sties to go away as well. FTP sites *after* websites, however, can be expected to have much, much more in the way of content. We can expect 'pub' directories to have much, much more in the way of specialization and indexing. Personal FTP sites would have vast amounts of things the site's owners would like or find interesting. MP3's, images both conventional and pornographic, movies, text files like e-books and fan-works, applications... The list goes on and on.
This model for MP3 sites was *almost* the way things worked. In 1993, there were about an equal number of FTP- and Web-sites. HTML was so much more versatile than an FTP site, so it dominated.
I think we'll also see a resurgance in the use of Usenet, which has been supplanted in many ways by weblogs and online message boards for BBS-type use. We may even see a resurgance in telnet-based BBS's. That would be cool.
The thing I think we'll see the most of if the web magically went away, would be the proliferation of internet sites that use Post-http era technology. This includes any of the P2P protcols like Gnutella or FastTrack, CVS, Freenet, streaming music and video, distributed problem solving like Seti@home and Folding@home, and many, many more.
The web is stagnant already, so this process is already beginning. Just look at the statistic figures for Gnutella or FastTrack to get an idea. I don't think BT will win their lawsuit, and I don't think that the web is going away anytime soon.
I don't think it would necessarily be a bad thing if it did.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
It took these guys years to realize they had it, and only now are they doing anything about it.
Not that it matters, since we all know their claim is invalid (see 1960's films on this)
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