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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."
Dear Timothy and the rest of Slashdot/Andover/VA,
Due to our patent on hyperlinking, and the fact that you hyperlinked to a story about this patent (we noticed many other hyperlinks on your page, as well), we are taking you to court.
Before settlement is reached, pelase remove all hyperlinks from your web page. Until a royalty settlement is agreed upon, it's tough-titties for you.
Sincerely,
B.T.
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.
From the patent:
"Informaton for display at a terminal apparatus of a computer is stored in blocks the first part of which contains the information which is actually displayed at the terminal and the second part of which contains information relating to the display and which may be used to influence the display at the time or in response to a keyboard entry signal."
Throughout the patent, references are made to "keyed digital data", but it never mentions mice, or pointing devices or point-and-click devices, etc.
So, if there is a literal interpretation, all you need to beat the patent is a mouse.
Now we just have to get the entire computer world to use these 'mice' things...
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
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 is seen as a complete joke by many in the UK internet community.
They dragged their feet over unmetered internet access via dial-up, their network fell over earlier in the week and they are very reluctant to unbundle the local loop.
Also, their ADSL package for regualar home users is tied to USB modems and costs £40/month (approx. $56).
Ijust read the patent, and here are a few observations...
1. The patent specifically specifies a "telephone network", and use of a modem. (which is why they're not suing the W3C)
2. The patent specifically states use of a a "terminal aperatus", stating not a "traditional computer terminal".
It also lays out a plan for non-crt use via alphanumeric display and keypad. No mention of a mouse.
There are some other vague points in there, but I believe the patent is practically invalid due to the fact that it was built around technology available in 1976. Technology has grown so rapidly that this patent is nearly garbage today.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I'm going down to the Boston Harbor right now and dumping *ALL* of my British bound packets right into the water.
That'll show them!
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
In 1968 Douglas C. Engelbart in this demo showed all the things we take for granted now every time we sit down at a computer, use a mobile phone or PDA - hyperlinks are not even half of it.
There is much more about Doug online here and a whole lot more on -
Enough said I think.
From the article: "Last year, BT said it had discovered that it holds U.S. patent 4,873,662"
Why do I have a mental picture of Jed Clampett in my head right now?
"Look Ma, We done found a hyperlink patent!"
"Well, Goll-y!"
Seriously though, you don't just "discover" that you have a patent, you wait until the sucker is approved then try to figure out the most strategic way to get money with it. I am so sick of these patents anymore.
Earlier /. discussions on this endearing little scam can be found here and here.
BT are that desperate for a bit of reliable revenue, as what passes for their management have slammed a company deep into the ground that looked so promising just 10 years ago.
They are still many billions of pounds in the red, despite issuing the biggest cash call in British history (5.9 billion pounds), some frantic sales of overseas assets, leasing back property, and more recently spinning off their mobile business. There have been angry scenes at emergency shareholder meetings, senior brass quitting in disgrace, etc. So right now they will grab at any readies they can lay their sticky little claws on.
I wish had enough space to tell you all the times I have been let down by BT on network projects: "sleepy ISDN" syndrome, installation "engineers" who couldn't find the right spot to put in a line despite my drawing big black boxes on the wall in magic-marker labelled "BT install here", etc. So much for the magic wand of privatisation, curing all those horrible nationalised industries.
Their mgt dug their heels in on ISDN roll-out to protect old business; they are finally being dragged by the regulator out of the same old racket on DSL. They are one of the worst-run businesses I've ever had the misfortune to work with. Starting out as a privatised monopoly with all the assets, skills and R&D firepower of the British govt's old monopoly telecoms service, they have successfully sucked all the value out of what might have made a good private competitor, and I don't expect them to be around in a year's time, at least not under the name BT.
So go for it lads, hoover it up while you can, and maybe you can cheer the shareholders up enough in the short term to allow you a cushy trip out the door when the buyout happens.
Am I coming across as bitter here? Sorry.
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.
Business ethics today are measured in profit/revenue terms. I.e. if it costs Bob, Inc. $2,000,000 to honor a contract which returns $1,000,000 and estimated legal and sundry expenses of breaking the contract are $500,000 then Bob, Inc. should break the contract.
This math leaves the value of goodwill and reputation out of the equation, and anyone who know anything about marketing knows that reputation is precious.
I once interviewed with a sleazy outfit called "Systemhouse", which failed to repay my travel expenses for the interview for about three months. After I called up the HR drone who promised that the company would cover my expenses, they sent me half of what I was owed, to the penny! (Of course, I called the bimbo right back, and informed her that if I didn't get paid in full by fedex the following day, I would tell everyone in the whole NeXT community what had happened, and that they would suddenly find it very difficult to recruit anyone with even one year of NeXTSTEP experience, since we all knew each other.)
I later learned, that SystemHouse had some idiotic bean counter very high up in their management (might even have been their CFO, I don't know), who had set a policy of never paying a bill until there was a threat of litigation, and then to send 1/2 of the amount owed, and hope that the claimant would just go away. Sure, it saved them a bunch of money on their payables, but I know that many of their vendors would only do business with them on a cash-in-advance basis. Turns out that some businesses do talk to each other.
It may seem to some short-sighted dweebs that they can make or save money by being unethical, but a business simply can't survive if their customers and vendors can't trust them. (Not unless they inherited IBM's mediocrity franchise, but that's a rather special case.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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!