By Mary Bellis
British Telecom (BT) has announced their intentions to enforce a patent that they hold. The company claims that their 1989 patent covers the concept of hyperlinking (i.e. linking) and they have hired the law firm of Scipher to enforce their patent rights to that hyperlink technology in the United States.
Dr Ken Gray, the chairman of Scipher, announced, "On behalf of BT we are attempting to license (hyperlink technology), and inviting licenses to be taken out by Internet Service Providers in the States. We will be inviting ISPs in the U.S. to license that technology from us." Letters of invitation have already been sent out to the top American ISPs, in fact. BT claims that they have been overlooking the royalty fees they could have charged for hyperlink technology for years but that they longer wish to do that.
The patent (U.S. #4873662) reads as follows: "This invention relates to an information handling system in which information is derived from a computer at a remote point and transmitted via the public telephone network to terminal apparatus. The invention also includes the terminal apparatus itself. It has been proposed to provide for domestic and/or business consumers a simplified form of computer terminal by means of which information stored in a computer can be obtained from it via the public telephone network. [Pay your licensing fee to BT and read the full patent by clicking on the hyperlink.]
A spokesman for BT said, "We patented the principle of the hyperlink in the mid-70s when people were still wearing kipper ties and flares." The patent was first filed in July 1977, refiled in 1980 and finally issued in 1989. The patent will expire in 2006 in the United States and has already expired outside of the United States.
The
alleged inventor of linking is retired post office researcher Desmond J.
Sargent of Felixstowe, United Kingdom. The original assignee or owner of
the patent was the British Post Office, which was later split into the
UK Post Office and British Telecom, the current intellectual property holders.
BT re-discovered that they owned the potentially lucrative patent in 1996.
Will the BT patent hold up and will the ISPs have to pay? British Telecom have decided not to pursue everyone with a webpage, but they are going after the companies which have either the money to pay lucrative licensing fees to BT or to pay the lawyer's fees necessary to fight the BT patent.
I predict that this will end up being an embarrassing fiasco for British Telecom and that they will not be able to uphold their patent claims to linking.
The following are the most likely defenses that will be taken against the validity of the British Telecom patent:
They took too long to sue. The patent was issued in 1989 and the Internet took off around 1995, if BT files a lawsuit in the year 2000, this would be a long amount of time taken to assert the patent. Experts consider this the weakest defense.
That no infringement took place, that British Telecom does not have a valid patent claim to linking as it is done today. Many experts believe that a good case can be made against the claims made that the 1989 patent is the same as linking today with modern PCs and the Internet. The 1989 patent refers to teletext, a system of information retrieval where TV viewers used their remotes to enter numbers and receive pages of sports and news information. In addition, experts have reason to argue that even if the patent claims were upheld about linking, why would the Internet Service Providers be responsible for paying the licensing fees and not the owners of every webpage that uses hyperlinks.
The
strongest defense against the 1989 patent is that the patent can be challenged
for not being novel and unobvious (patent qualifying requirements). The
patent reads similar to Ted Nelson's Xanadu, the original
hypertext
project, written in the early 1970s. Xanadu easily qualifies as prior
art and as prior art not mentioned in the BT patent (another patent requirement).
There are other examples like Xanadu of early research and papers that
most likely would invalidate the BT patent.
The anti-British Telecom sentiments have already begun, and it will be interesting to see how this situation plays itself out. In the meantime - warning - before you click on this hyperlink...
Any comments or thoughts on this affair are most welcome. Feel free to post an opinion. One reader feels the British are crazy.
