Posted by Toby A Inkster on 03/30/07 11:56

James Hutton wrote:

> I seem to recall, but it is very hazy, that British Telecom tried at one
> point to patent the hyperlink. Can anyone shed any light on this?

Indeed they did. About 8 years ago, BT noticed that they held a US patent
on hyperlinks. They proceeded to attempt to claim license fees from a
number of US ISPs. Prodigy stood up to them, so BT sued.

BT lost the case on the grounds that the technology covered in their patent
described a particular *method* of implementing hyperlinks, but hyperlinks
on the web use a different method. Same end result -- different invention
used to implement it.

Even if the judge hadn't ruled on those grounds, it is likely that BT's
patent claim could have been invalidated based in arguments of prior art.
I suppose that Prodigy chose to argue what they did, rather than arguing
prior art, because the former was an easier case to argue.

BT's original patent expired last year without any fanfare.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

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