Slashdot Mirror
82-Year-Old Coder Trumps BT's Hyperlink Patent
grendelkhan writes: "According to Wired News, 82 year-old programmer, Bob Bemer, claims his creation of escape invalidates British Telecomm's hyperlink patent. He has no intentions on cashing in, he just wants BT to quit suing people and prove, in his own words: 'All this new patent stuff is crazy and counterproductive.'"
"Can we get him?"
He invented the ESCAPE KEY!
... he sounds cool.
The basis of his case rests on the fact that http:// is actually HTTP. Luckily, neither he nor IBM patented this invention.
I want to meet this guy
That'll show big business what the old-timers can do! I reckon as punishment, BT should have to listen to one of his stories about either his long walks to school, duking german bullets and hiding from japanese commandos, or about the time he took a walk in the park, then went on the ferry and found a dime, that dime looked......
The Pain will be never ending... Death to Stupid Lawsuits!!!!
Nice to see that they also reference Ted Nelson and Stanford.
Someone there is on the ball...
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Damn slashcode ... I meant HTTP -colon- -ESC- -ESC-.
...and license it to everyone in the world for nothing, except BT which would have to pay $1 billion.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I'd like to get /. to do a question and answer with this guy.
Programming since the '40s!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
At 82 years old, this man should a lot about prior art.
Go Old People!
Th
This guy claims he invented the 'escape' key. Which is necessary for BT's hyperlink patent.
I can't see how that can have any relevance to this patent, which covers a very specific method of linking content together. Any patent can use information from another patent, but you would not be able to use what you invented (assuming it uses the other patent) without coming to an agreement with the other party. The fact remains that in that situation, both patents can be valid.
Please correct me if I am wrong - IANAL
This guy truly deserves the patent. He seems like a person who would use it responsibly...
If more people were like this think of where the idustry would be today.
Find the parallels between this (the BT case) and this patent lawsuit that SightSound is bringing against CDNow but potentally all music/video sellers. (SightSound claims they own the common methods of selling music and video over the Internet, and the judge has allowed the case to go to trial).
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Look, I don't like BT's patent more than anyone, but this guy's claim is just stupid. Inventing "escapes" as prior art to hyperlinks? Hyperlinks as a concept have nothing to do with the particular encoding you use for them. I could have a table separate from the next with descriptions of where the hyperlinks should be, and you would still have the concept of hyperlinks.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
84 years old, worked at berkley. Started in data entry then developed a macro to do some of it for her. A computer programmer in every sence of the word. Never made a name for herself.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
It's sad. Technology develops through decades of work by many people. That's why I put my work into the public domain whenever possible.
As should anyone who is interested in truly advancing technology in a community setting. This is contrary to the "F"SF teaching that only through the forced opening of source code can technological advancement and community be achieved.
The GPL is the anti-community. It locks developers into a very evil paradigm, one of stealing others' ideas. It is the epitome of what is wrong with computing today. Scratch that. The GFDL is the epitome of what is wrong with computing today, but the GPL is a close second.
Public domain, folks. Do it for your employers, or do it for everyone. The first gets you paid, the second is true giving.
Don't fall for the "F"SF's bastardized notion of "Freedom".
If there's anybody claiming patents built on 'escape' technology then it's MS.
Ctrl-Alt-Esc is the way I usually shut down my MS applications for godsake.
Next thing you know, he'll be making other outragous claims, such as he invented the question mark and will accuse chestnuts of laziness.
This can't be said enough. Read my other post here
I really wish this whole phase of everyone sueing everybody over stupid sh*t would be over and done with --- and this includes lawyers that found something in their records from the late 1800's that sounds kind of like something that we're doing on the internet now, and thinking that they can make a few million dollars off of it. I think it all started with that stupid woman who sued McDonalds because their coffee was hot, and she was dumb enough to spill it all over herself. Every since then, cases like this have been coming out of the woodworks left and right.
It's about time someone told these folks to shut their collective traps and start trying to make money the old-fashioned way: earn it!
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
I loved this quote from the article:
"Technology develops through decades of work by many people. That's why I put my work into the public domain whenever possible."
Why can't everybody think more like this old guy??
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Escape's powers are huge but at its most basic level, it is a command that tells a computer to make a shift in its processing -- allowing a user to move up, down or sideways through files, programs or networks...
Escape also appears in every hyperlink as a slash (/), a programming command that allows Web users to move from computer system to computer system, or from page to page, in a website simply by clicking on a hyperlink.
Back in the day, when programmers didn't even ponder the possibility of owning code, or patenting ideas. Back when multiuser operating systems had no passwords, and a commands called "KILL SYSTEM" that strangely enough, although being accessible to everyone, was never abused.
How things have changed.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Both markup languages (HTML; embedded link) and escapes are out of band metadata. Escapes allow an xterm, a real terminal, etc, to show bold, underline, and so on. I believe some data terminals use escape to mark protected fields for "editing" a page on the screen, then hitting SEND to send the unprotected fields, or maybe the entire screen, back to the computer. And of course you know all about HTML markup :-)
In both cases, the escaped / embedded metadata is not visible on the screen, yet has important information about the page. It is not far fetched at all to consider escaped data as a link. I don't know if it has ever been done, but it could be.
Infuriate left and right
Harvey Ball, the creator of the smiley face image, (not the ascii [:-)] ) died not too long ago! He never trademarked his creation, however, but he did form a corporation to make smiley greeting cards and sell them with profits going to charity.
However, some French Dude registered the trademark in a bunch of countries, and Ball considered going after him to keep the smiley free.
This story reminds us why something like the GPL is so important: It ensures that information that is free stays free! Public Domain resources (even smileys!) can be snatched up and made into commodities!
Even if his claim doesn't pass judicial muster, it *will* throw a monkey wrench into BT's legal plans. At the very least i bet it costs em a few million more in legal fees as they analyze things before they (hopefully) get thrown out of court on their arse
These sorts of concepts which are being pressed at the patent office may be new to some people, but they are not new. In particular, this idea of escapes would have been completely obvious to anybody with a little mathematical training, in 1950 or 1900 or even 100BC.
You could argue that the application of the idea is novel, but differentiating an abstract notion from its collection of concrete instances is a tricky thing, and properly the subject of philosophy and metamathematics, not the patent office's incompetent review staff.
BH
Fools! They laughed at me at the Sorbonne...!
I was thinking with his time in the industry this guy's got a claim at more than a few of the bounties at www.bountyquest.com (www.bountyquest.com) - and I hope noone else can claim based on his revelations!
And so does wired.
If I read it right, he invented the escape sequence. Like in a shell when you type
rm Stupid\ File\ that\ a\ window\$ lu\$er created.mp3
Those kinds of escapes, the ones that are used to within normal text to denote something to be handled non-literally. In other words, he is actually claiming that HTML uses escape sequences < and > to denote special handling of hyperlinks, same with the ampersand escaped characters, like I just used.
The escape key has nothing to do with this.
82 years old. I guess this proves that becoming a crotchety cyberphobe is a matter of choice rather than age.
http://www.bobbemer.com/a-plate1.JPG
The Main Page - http://www.bobbemer.com
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
Memex, Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think"... http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~dduchier/misc/vbush/aw mt.html
Ok, this guy helped invent ASCII, of all things.
What did BT do?
If we're going to talk about them as a "concept" then the first table of contents, index, bibliography, dictionary, etc ad nausium, trump BT's "concept". It's the encoding that automates the looking up of the object of interest that makes hyperlinks useful and even interesting at all.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Back in 1920, when I was in Alcatraz.
I got the jey and escaped.
Tada!
He mentions then term 'escape sequence' and then somehow binds that to the escape key. The only relation between an 'escape sequence' and an escape key is that the begining on the traditional ansi escape sequence starts with the same code the escape key generates.
An 'escape sequence' according to Webopedia is:
The fact is that the escape sequence in a traditional hyperlink is the information encoded after the filename (that's encoded with URL-encoding). It's all those neat %20 characters.
Check out this quote:
Escape's powers are huge but at its most basic level, it is a command that tells a computer to make a shift in its processing - allowing a user to move up, down or sideways through files, programs or networks. For example, every press of a phone key that allows a user to move through an automated information service is an invocation of Berner's escape principle.
This is just absurd. Escape sequences special sequences encoded other data. A telephone navigation system is merely a command driven system. Nothing is escaped. By this logic, every time anyone tells anything to do anything they are invocating Berner's escape principle.
I understand the guy's position, but Wired really blew it on this story. I'm suprised this made it past the technical editors...
BTW: The article mentions the '/' character as being an escape sequence, but this is not true. If they are referring to the href of a URL, then since the protocol preceeds the '/', this would not be an example of an escape sequence. I think the real issue is the escape sequences preceeded by '%' signs.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
25 years and women still seem to be nasty.
Crudely put, though he does have a point. How tolerant are *most* 82 yr olds?
He put the slash in Slashdot (a slash being an interupt, i.e. http\
He put the backslash in ASCII code (without it, where would DOS be now.... oh, I mean.. nevermind)
He Texas Plates are "ASCII". That just rocks in itself.
He helped invent COBOL. I learned to program on COBOL. I can't even imagine the fortitude trying to make an entire programming language. The old programmers had it really tough. Imagine wanting to program in a high level, so you have to design and implement a high level language yourself.
The whole reason this got out is simply because he is fed up with all of these outrageous patents. Hyperlinking... bah, One click purchasing.
He is one of us (albiet probably the oldest)
Slashdot would do good for itself to do an interview with him, maybe even make him the honorary "grandpa" of slashdot.
Blah Blah Blah.
It occurs to me that it is a sad thing that we have to rely on someone like Mr. Bemer to do the job of the government and protect the hapless consumer from the wrath of the corporation and its bevy of lawyers.
There was a post on here which expressed optimism that Mr. Bemer seemed like a responsible enough person to grant the patent. What patent? Why should this be patented to begin with? The system should be rigged such that philanthrophic caretakers should not have to appear; what happens next time when BT decides to patent the power button?
The system is failing the consumer/citizen here. I think deeper introspection is required of the legal system and the IP code.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
I didn't know we could say Fuck on this site??
thelikesofwhich.com
See subject line. The concept of putting links inside of text is at issue here, this is done with the shift-comma escape sequence. He had similar escape sequences back in the day.
YEAH BABY!
'bout time a pattentholder isn't lookin to cash in...
Which one played him in the movie.
Wasn't Bemer portrayed by Steve McQueen. Those damned Nazis. If it wasn't for the 'escape' we never would have witnessed one of the finest war movies of all time.
I dunno what it is but it's funny to think of an 82 yr old programmer throwing a baseball back forth against his cubicle wall.
:)
Had Bemer or IBM, his employer at the time, patented the escape concept, he or they could own a sizable chunk of the world's technology right now.
If he had indeed patented this in 1960, the patent would have expired by now. Even if it took a few years for him to get the patent, the 17 years would be long over.
Unless he purposely dragged on the application process for years to make the patent last longer, like The Patent King.
Now, there is a 20 year limit from the year of filing.
IANAL, BIWOWALF3Y.
yo.
very cool that the old guys knew that this stuff belonged in the public domain. now if we could only convince that generation following them!
Ummmm... Ted Nelson is neither British nor a scientist. He merely invented hypertext and hypermedia.
"Other examples of hyperlinks also predate BT's patent, including a 1965 book by British scientist Ted Nelson..."
How do I know? Because I co-implemented the first working hypertext and hypermedia on personal computers, for Ted, and demo'd it at the world's first personal computer conference, in Philadelphia, in -- was it 1976?
That was before Radio Shack, IBM, or Apple even made personal computers...
Ted Nelson is merely a grandfather of the World Wide Web. Remind me -- what exactly did BT do except shove electrons through wires?
Wired and BT are BOTH wrong.
I say: fly Ted Nelson by Concorde to the trial and treat him as the VIP he is, pay hom $1,000 and hour as an epert witness, and then give him a share of the winnings in court!
"...like he invented the question mark."
- dr. evil
I just wish BT would quit filing lawsuits and go back to his strong point, making great techno music. Michael-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
So, this might seem like a weird point to
bring up, but if you pause for a second and think,
the "ESCAPE" he is talking about is really just
another way of specifyin address to jump to. Think of it in this manner, what if we considered computer instructions, machine instructions to be escape sequences that cause other
parts of the microcode in a processor to execute? Am I making any sense here? So basically, if we want to get
ridiculous, we could make the same sort of claim that pointers to data structures or functions in computer memory constitute prior art in terms of hyperlinking.
Hmm..
It seems like this kind of thought will provoke others to take existing technology and ideas, and start patenting specific uses, or how they are used in certain contexts, and patent them.
Its really sad that the patent system came to what we have today, I would love to see how the originators of the patent system would think of this. It would be like patenting the use of a horse to go from city a to city b or something.
Ah well, I hope the best for this 80 year old guy, he seems to have a great mind when it comes to the world, and BT needs a big slap in the face.
Zeno
it was developed to take the intellectual challenge out of crashing the system, thus removing any motivation to do so (for the old school hackers anyway, not the testosterone-pissfest-let'sfuckshitup 14-year old script kiddies of today :-/). ISTR i learned of it reading Steven Levy's _Hackers_, but ICBW... see ITS on jargon.org for some background on the OS it was "featured" in.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Kind of ironic that the "Father of ASCII" worked for IBM, that bastion of EBCDIC.
-- Alastair
I get it :)
John Waalkes
Maybe he punched 'goatse' links in (HTTP:// was there mind you!) on his key card computer to trick people! Infact, maybe he is one of the the "grandparents of Goatse"! (you've seen the picture.)
Ctrl-Alt-Esc is the way I usually shut down my MS applications for godsake.
You're confusing the Mac OS kill-current-app command (Cmd+Option+Esc) with the Windows task-manager command (Ctrl+Alt+Del). Ctrl+Alt+Esc in Windows ME just opens the Start menu, the same as Ctrl+Esc.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If the monitor were touchscreen and allowed navigation of documents via point and follow, without a mouse or keyboard interface.
A hyperlink, after all, is only a button without the IMG tag, and a button is really an esc key without the white silk screened text and membrane-spring tactile mechanism...
GPL Deconstructed
i figure if the patent office smoked enough crack to grant bt that patent, and that other music distrobution patent, then this guy might be able to convince them that his work is prior art.
the biggest problem with these patents, is that someone comes up with a REALLY broad idea that no one else has decided is worth patenting and then, years later, when someone inadvertantly uses that patent to create something ubiquitous, they start claiming all rights to it
on the plus side: maybe the guy who wrote goodtimes, will sue microsoft for the idea of an e-mail worm that can spread automatically...
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
I don't understand why and how this case can have any influence to the world outside the UK.
I mean, okay, there are those international agreements about patents, and most likely British Telecom's (British) patent will be covered by them, BUT...
If a British court finds that BT really DID invent hyperlinks... so what?
Anyone outside Great Britain would refuse to pay anything to them, bring the case to their courts, and maybe have BT's patent disapproved. Okay, so now you have to pay for a hyperlink if you are in the UK, but, for example, not in Germany (and this is not fantasy - being German, I can't imagine a german court that would follow the British judgement. If in doubt, German judges tend to legalize whatever is useful to the German economy. Since almost every company anywhere uses hyperlinks, you can imagine what'd happen)
As a British citizen with a website, I'd just go to Germany and host my Website - with hyperlinks - from here.
Can anyone tell me where the problem is?
The entire point of the Escape is that it's a signal that the next bit(s) of information are not to be treated as part of the data stream. The escape is in the data stream, therefore it's in-band. Likewise the html codes for bold in this post - I didn't phone up slashdot and ask them to embolden certain characters (an out of band signal), I entered them in the comment field along with the rest of the data. They are in-band.
Or HIJBT?
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
WTF i submit the story about BT long b4 i saw it finaly posted here and /. rejects my story?!?!? Slashdot is a biased peice of crap
It's fucking good fucking therapy, but don't fucking expect to get your fucking ass modded the fuck up for it. In most fucking cases, the fucking best you can fucking hope to fucking get is +1 Fucking Funny, and that's only if you've got some fucking informative shit mixed in with all the fucking profanity.
Love,
Anonymous Fucking Coward
P.S. Don't fucking try this shit at home, kids.
"83 year old CODGER"?
Then again, Slashdot never cared too much about spelling.
....is that so many people are going out of their way to blast guy and argue *in favor* of BT. What, you all suddenly convert to corporate whoredom overnight? Or is it the idea that an old guy invented something you think belongs to a younger generation?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Bolloxed up my phone bill last month - of course, they have prior art on that... they invented it.
escape to me is \ not /... but anyway... it's grandpa :)
All that is true. But what does any of that have to do with hyperlinks -- the CONCEPT of hyperlinks, not the implementation. Hyperlinks have nothing to do with in-band data, or out-of-band data. That's all implementation detail.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
He's an interesting guy, the Father of ASCII.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Well... patents are a lot less about actual ideas and more about implementation detail (at least, theoretically) than people think. A patent applies to a very specific idea--one that cannot be divorced from its implementation, A wheel might be patentable because of its implementation... nebulous talk about transportation axes means nothing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=27986&op=Reply &threshold=-1&commentsort=3&tid=155&mode=nested&pi d=3011804
is NOT a hyperlink.
To be a hyperlink it would need the proper escape sequences.
Do you mean the CONCEPT of something that takes you somewhere and occupies zero space to do it? Or upper case is text and lower case is hyperlink? Or tagged text as in tntotrtmtatlt tttetxtt or hhhyhphehrhlhihnhk?
are hogwash!
Personally I would really like to see BT win this patent battle (no keep reading). I can see nothing that would bring home the message about how flawed the US patent system is that seeing the web forcibly turned into a proprietary system. At the very least it would give the European anti-patent lobby more clout at a time when the EU is (still) forming a policy on software patents.
Whether or not the concept of a hyperlink is independent of some actual implementation of hyperlinks using escape sequences isn't at issue. Patents cover methods for doing things, not concepts. You couldn't patent the concept of a hyperlink.. just some implementation of hyperlinks. Your patent would cover only inventions that did the same thing using that method, not inventions that did the same thing using some different method.
I'm guessing that BT's patent explicitly includes the escape sequence as part of the method they were patenting, and that would be why Bemer's prior use of the escape sequence invalidates it.
>The GPL is the anti-community. It locks developers into a very evil paradigm, one of stealing others' ideas.
This is exactly why the GPL has to exist -- so that developers don't steal others' ideas.
Placing software into the public domain will defend against patents by being evidence of prior art. However, it does not defend against someone using public domain software in an 'embrace and extend' strategy. What if hyperlinks were public domain but the HTTP protocol was patented?
The GPL exists solely as a defense against monopolists; it is a defense mechanism for guaranteeing that your gift to the community remains free. Until more enlightened times, I can't see the benefit of releasing as public domain.
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
I don't support BT, but the escape key sequence has at best a tenuous connection to hyperlinks. Just because you need some kind of keyword sequence to embed a link in text does not mean that this embodies the whole idea of a hyperlink, infact it has almost nothing to do with hyperlinking. The REAL prior art has already been discovered, we don't need to claim unrelated art defeats the BT patent claims, this will only distract and strengthen BT's invalid claim.
He should get the patent to spur controversy over the subject of patents and get them cancelled.
And to succeed, he could try changing the minds of companies that like patents, by charging them a lot of money.
Isn't it so?
>crazy and counterproductive.
USA in a nutshell.
...it was all the rage at the time...
There are plenty of E-mail programs that will auto-hyperlinkize a (non-escaped) URL.
In fact, all the hoopla about Microsoft's auto-hyperlinking of words to their own dictionary is non-inline (may be inline internally prior to feeding it to the HTML renderer) to the original data stream.
Anyone remember Hypercard/Supercard from the Mac? (Do they still exist?) You could hyperlink stuff way back when. The web is more than a little reminiscent of that.
"All representatives are busy. The estimated hold time is one..hundred..sixty..four..minutes." Detroit Edison, 02/01/02
Coffee is too hot for human consumption when it's freshly made. That's in the nature of coffee. Opening it over your lap falls damn close to the "don't do that, then" category. Do you also complain that your new kitchen knives are sharp enough to cut you and should have been sold pre-dulled?
Out of how many billion cups of coffee served at thousands of locations over 50-odd years? If the safety nazis had their way, the entire world would be padded so we couldn't bump our widdle shins on anything. The world is dangerous; that's in its nature too. People should accept that fact instead of looking for somebody to blame every time they get hurt.I think Iraq should sue all users of indo-european languages for royalties on written language. They clearly invented cuneiform (as Babylonia).
I saw Ted the other day and if he's not a scientist (which I'd argue he is) he sures LOOKS the part. He's office sharing with Stevan "CogPrints" Harnad at the University of Southampton, which is in Britain.
Academia is about "cool" factor just as much as high school was. Stevan and Ted are cool because they said unpopular things and were later proved right (in older disciplines they give you a Nobel Prize if you do this)
OTOH Xanadu may be visionary but it's also quite impossible to implement. So it could be patented, but you could never violate the patent.
Similarly Stevan's opinions about Turing's test are purely academic. Real robots that pass Turing but fail Stevan's alternative tests would most likely be intelligent, and be accepted as such, even Stevan wouldn't object once they were capable of having a decent argument with him.
man, these kind of trolls are irritating.
Now, I'm not saying I like this system, mind you. I don't. But the patent office simply doesn't have the resources and isn't give the responsibility to check patents more rigorously.
I actually met him, a couple of years ago, at my parents' Swarthmore reunion. He was a interesting guy to talk to, but very very bitter. I asked him about hyperlinking, and he seemed to think that he had been robbed. He went on a five or ten minute rant about how they had taken all the credit away from him, and what was more, they had "fucked it up".
His business card advertises himself as a "programmer, teacher and contrarian." I'm not sure that he would make a very good witness, only because he's so bitter. But who knows?
When I met him, I really didn't have any idea who he was, and I was like 10 at the time. Wow. I wish I'd asked more intelligent questions.
Fax machines did exist in the 19th century but were
proprietary. Fax was little used until open standards for a fax modem were created. This open standard fax modem definition allowed fax machines to talk to each other, anywhere.
Proprietary vendors had little market for their product, until open standards were established.