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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.'"
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
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.
This can't be said enough. Read my other post here
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
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.
But she had a daughter/son who then had you, a loving grandson.
This is infinitely more important than a name.
Maybe she did things like this guy, from who we never heard before. This is truly being geek: doing things because they are cool, not because of fame or money.
Congrats on your grandma.
Crudely put, though he does have a point. How tolerant are *most* 82 yr olds?
It is not far fetched at all to consider escaped data as a link.
This is wrong on two counts:
1) The concept of hyperlink is what was patented, not the encoding of a hyperlink. A hyperlink can be implemented without any concept of an escape.
2) Escaped data might be a link, but that's an interpretation of the data. An escape is an encoding, nothing more.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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!
Wow, and a marriage proposal on the same day. Love must be in the air. I hope my wife doesn't smell it because she'll want jewelry or something.
I wonder if the patent office will ever be sued (though there are some hoops to jump through to be able to do this) for gross negligence, or something. Some of the patents they're letting through are fraudulent, in a way that should be obvious to a member of the profession, let alone a supposedly skilled examiner.
I can picture a company like AOL or Microsoft having the money to sue the PTO for reimbursment of their court costs against SightSound, or some other jerkwater company consisting of a patent and a flock of lawyers.
While I'm sure big companies like IBM have patented their share of obvious gadgets they've also got some real patents and this general weakening of patents (what's a patent worth, every idiot can get one) stands to hurt them a lot.
I'd love to see the government called to the carpet for their failures and the consequences those have had on the populace.
sPh
P.S. Why the @#$#@#$@ can't I log in when I use Netscape 6.2?
And all of this was because women during World War II held this country together by taking on many jobs that were traditionally male dominated while the men fought and died overseas. Not to sound overly sentimental or patriotic but both my grandmothers worked as well as ran a household and I have endless respect for them.