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BT Loses Case Over Hyperlink Patent
Tarkie sent in this Bloomberg blurb noting that British Telecom has lost their patent suit against Prodigy over an old patent that BT hoped would cover the use of hyperlinks on the modern WWW. See our original story or check out the court's decision.
Its good to see some of these completely absurd lawsuits getting downturned. This needs to happen more, so we can legitimize patent law into something reasonable. All it does now is stifle market growth and create money for lawyers.
By the way the article is written, BT was using Prodigy as a "test case" for every ISP.
Could you imagine? Scary thing is, I wouldn't have been totaly shocked if it did pass.
So why did they sue an ISP, rather then say, W3C?
It is far to simpler to hold the world hostage under the guise of protecting IP and charge a ransom from everyone who uses it.
Remember, the Amazon 1-click patent is still valid! It is not worried about the absence of a business plan that drives them towards profitability, but wants to prevent other websites from using cookies to enable faster checkouts.
Ultimately, I think that is the problem with all these patents and copyrights. If companies truly believed in their products and the value that they provide to their customers, they wouldn't have to resort such stupid mechanisms to make money.
All your favorite sites in one place!
This will set the UK back at least 10 years. Imagine if you invented something wonderful, and the courts stole it from you.
Sorry, A.C., but they didn't invent it.
Hyperlinking, as practiced on the internet, was described by Ted Nelson, in books published years before they applied for that patent.
Indeed, Ted is the one who coined and popularized the terms "Hypertext" and "Hyperlink".
What bugs me is that, as I read it, the judge's decisions about "central computer", "blocks of data", and "complete address" are all wrong. The patent should have applied to the Internet (by the doctrine of equivalences) and should have been struck due to the prior art.
But then again, IMHO patents on "doing X with a computer when people are already doing X by hand" should be unpatentable. (A generic patent on simulating human workflow would have been patentable shortly after the inventionn of the digital computer, but it's far too late for that now.)
And also IMHO essentially all software patents OTHER than "doing X by computer when people are already doing X by hand" should be struck as patenting "mathematical algorithms".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually, there were a couple of comments in the text that suggest that the judge really did feel like this was a silly case.
In particular, there was the section where BT was trying to show that an HTML file could be constructed in a manner fitting the description of the two-block files described in BT's patent. The BT witness built an example HTML file that demonstrated this point.
The judge rejected this line of reasoning, saying "BT cannot claim that Prodigy infringes its patent, or induces others to infringe its patent, if it must invent the infringing device itself."
Personally I think that was pretty funny; and morsels like this indicate to me that the judge was quite on top of things.
Not as similar as you think. The reasoning is not as closely aligned, as the JPEG compression algorithm had to be thought of, designed, and implemented developed by someone, somewhere. That is to say, an image compression algorithm is obviously too complex to be "conceptual" (in the free domain of thought). If that entity which created JPEG has rights, then that entity has rights--but far be it from me to agree that those who created JPEG are Forgent, or any subsidiaries therein. However, that is not the case with hyperlinks, which are purely conceptually existent, and have been for a very long time (since the 60s). Compare this to trying to claim a patent on footnotes.
So I'm wondering about all those /. readers who complained about how terrible patents are because they allowed BT to make this claim... doesn't the fact that BT lost the suit prove that the law isn't as broken as you thought?
Same with the case with HP and the DMCA. The fact that HP can file the lawsuit doesn't prove that the law is broken; it's only broken if they would have won.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
Read the decision PDF. It makes it clear that Prodigy (and the internet in general) didn't infringe on BT's patent because BT's patent description was slightly too narrow -- and also because the judge [IMHO] doesn't understand what a "server" ("central computer" in BT jargon) is.
What it does NOT do is throw out BT's patent on the basis of prior art. That is, BT's patent still stands to harass us yet another day.
First, while that's true, that's not the only part of their argument the judge found lacking. He also asserted that their patent claimed it involved "complete addresses", which a URL is typically not because it must be processed with name resolution to be useful. There were other issues, with BT trying to claim that an Internet address was 'equivalent' to a 'complete address' (per the "doctrine of equivalents" embodied in patent law), but that was shot down too, because apparently BT narrowed their claims on the patent to get around prior art.
I find it interesting, of course, since DNS is not the only address translation required. Before reaching the end server (and the patent says, "Central computer"), an ARP translation will be required as well to translate an IP address into a MAC address for transit across the physical+datalink layers of IP.
The funny thing is that this patent was supposedly dead from prior art from what we've all heard, and it didn't even get far enough. Basically, the judge dismissed them for grossly misinterpreting the patent, never mind that it would likely have been rendered invalid by prior art had they even made it that far. I hope BT had to pay court costs.
`a device does not infringe because it can be made to infringe'
Hmm... So we can apply this idea to patent law, but my question is can it then be applied to copywrite law as well?
Thus, something like DeCSS which does not violate copywrite law on its own but can be made to, would not be in violation. A photocopier would be an example of this idea. While a photocopier can be used to reproduce an entire book, since it doesn't have to be used that way it is ok.
Just a thought.
"All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
- Alexandar Woolcot
No, it doesn't nullify the patent. OTOH, it does say that the patent does not and can not apply to the Web no matter how hard BT tries to strech it. Since nobody here is likely to try using the type of system that the patent does cover, it's just as good as ruling it invalid.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Don't mistake this followup for a sign that I care, but how can the first post be redundant? It just doesn't make sense!
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Read the bottom of page 18 and the top of 19. "[T]he question is not what a device could have been made to do, but what it was intended to do and what it did do." I wonder if this will help a big in the RIAA mess. It would be a little bit of a stretch, but lawyers are supposed to be good at such things.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
While I'm not normally one to go aiding SBC Communications, the current owner of Prodigy, I do believe BT needs to be smacked with a remedy of paying all the legal costs of the defendant. Because the ruling came early, it won't be so much. But because it is so blantantly harrassment and baseless, even SBC Communications deserves to recover the costs they had to spend to pay for their lawyers and legal department staff to research and prepare briefs, make motions, and all that other mumbo-jumbo that lawyer types do.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I am sorry to see such an important case squandered by a short-sighted judge. He managed to turn them down this time, but the fight is not over. A decision in favor of BT would have been more fortunate in the long run: then the absurtidy of patents, and software patents in general would get some intense scrutiny. Seeing BT sue every hyperlink author, hyperlink user, web server operator and all their respective mothers for billions of pounds in damages would surely make one or two people think twice before defending the righteousness of intellectual property law.
As far as I can see, and the law goes, BT was right, the judge was wrong. What this all comes down to is the fundamental truth: Intellectual property is a flawed concept.