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BT Pushing Hyperlink Patent
There's been a lot of new publicity lately about the British Telecom trying
to defend a patent that they claim means
they invented hyperlinking. Currently they are going after Prodigy for
using hyperlinking back in the early eighties. We've
mentioned
this one before, but it really looks like they are going to
push it. Insane.
I wouldn't get too worried about this.
However, it would appear that BT only discovered this patent in 2000. Therefore, they made absolutely no effort to enforce it over the last 15 or so year that it was being used by countless companies and organizations, not to mention end users. Even if they're able to extract royalties from this day forward, can they go back retroactively and enforce them on older products as well? Even the GIF patent, which I disagree with, only charged royalties from that day forward, not from the date they obtained the patent.
Can I do this legally? Patent something, hope someone else develops a similar technology, say nothing for 20 years until the patent is about to expire and economies depend on my product, then just raise my hand one day and say, "Excuse me! You have to pay me now".
I know the patent holder can selectively choose to license that patent for no charge and they coudlnt' come back later and change their minds retroactively. What about in this situation, where they've said nothing. Done nothing to enforce it. Didn't even realize they HAD the patent. Its almost as if they were purchasing patents for the sole purpose of hoping one of them would be a huge breadwinner in the future.
However, at least they had an actual product tied to the patent. Its not as bad as the idiot who patented "downloading music off the internet" as an idea with no product to back it up and trying to extort money out of companies as a result.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
BT are a privatised corporation - they used to be Government owned and run (actually, while the BBC is paid for by a tax they defend their independance fiercely), but were sold off during the 1980s to pay for tax breaks.
As for the whole patent thing, I've no idea when the patent runs out, and I'm not even going near the question of if its defendable. Let the lawyers argue that one out.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
BT started off from a monopoly several years ago, and have maintained this position though bullying and attacking the rest of the marketplace. BT are terribly complacient and it shows though thier buisness stratagy. From their failure to recognise the burden their debts have placed on the company (which worried the city no end) right though to the running battles they've had with other service providers over local loop unbundling (i.e. giving flat rate charges to other competitors to access last mile)
Oftel (the UK offical telecoms regulator) have been having running battles with them ever since thier creation.
I don't think BT really give a damn about getting this kind of bad press. Those people that listen already know their aggressive buisness tactics, though that don't care...well, don't care.
Those are probably hyperlinks to resources within the same computer. BT may be claiming hyperlinks among resources distributed across a network. That should be an obvious extension, but "obviousness" is a much harder defense against patent infringement than prior art.
I worked at CompuServe in the mid 80's .GIF, using
(for the guy that invented
a "free" algorithm found in an ACM journal
that later turned out to be patented) and
keep in touch with people over there (CompuServe/AOL) from time to time.
At one point, AOL had retained the ex-Compuserve CTO to do historical research into patentable
things that the company had done. I would lay money that CompuServe/AOL will challenge this
if it goes very far.
If you read the patent itself (patent office link from the article), or at least the abstract, it specifically mentions "operation of a selected key of the keyboard". (Later on it says "The terminal apparatus may include data entry means, such as a manual keyboard"). Funny if they somehow win, maybe browsers will have to remove keyboard shortcuts, but mouse and trackpad clicking is still A-OK. (And then Amercians with Disabilities Act crew will jump on it...)
But yeah, this is really insane. Also, so many patents like this seem like they don't pass the "not obvious to a practitioner of the field" test.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
As a Brit, I find the "Call 0800-ambulance-chasers now!" adverts repulsive. They air the adverts mostly during the working day, obviously to target the unemployed or unemployable since they're most likely to need some quick and easy money.
:-)
The companies providing these "services" have been the subject of numerous documentaries and consumer affairs programs on UK TV, and regularly exposed for the rogue outfits they so obviously are. Most of the "victims" only recieve a tiny amount of compensation, while the law firms reap the real rewards.
It is absolutely pathetic; people seem to want to take no responsibility for their own lives any more. I still don't believe the UK has decended to the level of litigeousness of the States as yet, but some of the bottom feeders are slowly but surely crawling their way there...
I have no other problems with America, by the way, just its legal system, patent system and Bill Gates
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Played with hypertext for laboratory information systems in the mid-1980s, and for prior art, *I* leaned upon Ted Nelson's ComputerLib/Dream Machines http://www.xanadu.com as well as earlier cites for the mechanical Memex system proposed by Vannevar Bush (not dubya) in work cited in "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/comput er/bushf.htm
;-)
Althought it may be an urban legend, there's supposed to be a patent for playing with a cat with a laser - all things are possible. The patent office hasn't *exactly* had enough cycles to deal with the issue of bona-fide new inventions versus poorly researched claims.
But given a lot of other history, BT is probably safe from worstening its public relations image with this boner
Verizon: Latin for "poor rural service".
As I said, offtopic but not quite. A British company is trying to patent salted chips, or fries, as we USAns know it. The group, ActionAid, is trying to point out the stupidity of modern foods patent laws. Their announcement is here.
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
Looking at the text of the Patent itself... for item #5, where they describe terminals as apparatuses for providing access via telephone lines. Doesn't that then negate the "terminals" which don't use telephone lines?
So my PC which uses EtherNet via wireless networking or via Cat-5 cabling which I wired myself is then not inclusive in the patent's description of a "Terminal" and can thus use hyper text linking without stepping on the patent in question.
Or line-of-sight from building to building IR/Laser data transmission which is not provided for or maintained by a Telco and so is not a "telephone line".
As the patent doesn't go into details of what they mean by "telephone line", I think that provides a pretty big hole in their coverage. I can see how it might cover dial-up users, but for other line/wireless/etc users, it becomes exceedingly grey/black.
I do find one interesting thing about the description of the invention in the Abstract:
If anything, I would say that implementing the click-links/HTML/etc protocols has made the operating protocols of the computer even more complex, not any easier.
Pot-Shot-Summary:
What I got out of the patent text was that:
Any terminal/computer/etc connected not through telephony lines is exempt from the Patents.
Any terminal system which does not show the various charges and/or accumulation of charges is exempt from this patent as the patent covers systems which primarily deals with listing charges for services and the accumulation of them.
Guess another question would be: How would BT enforce this? The technology is so prevelant on the web that to remove it all, would not be financially sound to BT itself.
But then again, it doesn't seem like they really care about what people think about them or who they shove out of the way or trample on so long as they get their money.
Though I do wonder... some more text taken from the patents text:
What does it mean that this is a continuation application? And what does it mean when for the child patent when the parent patent has been abandoned?
Hmm...
Of course they don't. But suddenly things like this have a MUCH bigger impact when their ISP sends them a bill that looks like something they might receive from the telephone company, listing every link they've clicked on with its itemized cost. When at the end they have to pay $249 for the month instead of $14.99, they'll really start caring. Not to mention the fact that somebody was invading their privacy and actively tracking their links to pr0n. Yeah, I think PR is going to be a big big issue. If BT loses this, I really hope that our courts issue a rather acid remark about frivilous lawsuits. Maybe somebody at BT will be looking for a new job soon, although not likely.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?