BY INVOKING an ancient patent in order to claim a monopoly on
“hyperlinking”—the key technology that makes the World Wide Web go
round—British Telecom has unwittingly unleashed the power of the Internet
as a worldwide patent-buster.
Webmasters and Internet users everywhere are up in arms over the claim and
are urgently trawling the Net for “prior art” that might invalidate BT’s
patent.
In 1976, the then Post Office applied for patents on an improvement to its
online information service, Prestel. The Post Office wanted to split up the
information on Prestel pages into blocks that could be linked together, charged
for by use, and sent down phone lines. But Prestel flopped—and BT was
later hived off from the Post Office and privatised.
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BT’s patents were granted in a dozen countries, but have lapsed after their
20-year lifespans. But for reasons that are not yet clear, the US patent
application (US 4873662) was effectively only filed in 1986—and granted in
1989—and will remain in force until 2006.
Why BT has chosen this moment to defend its patent is unclear. “We’ve been
giving it considerable thought for some time,” a BT spokesman says. “We’re now
approaching US Internet Service Providers in order to generate revenue from the
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But 91av has discovered that it may have been an online
newsletter that gave BT the idea to defend its patent. Greg Aharonian, who runs
the Internet Patent News Service, spotted the patent in 1997 and suggested in a
newsletter that “with a few legal gymnastics” it might “cover all uses of Web
pages”. Knowing BT researchers subscribed to his newsletters, Aharonian
mischievously offered to buy the patent and earn “hundreds of millions”. But he
heard nothing from BT.
Now, three years on, BT has employed a patent licensing firm, QED Scipher, to
try to extract royalties from Internet Service Providers in the US. To succeed,
BT must prove that its old description of clunky viewdata hardware covers modern
Internet links. BT must also hope that no one can now prove that anything
similar had been published or used before the US patent was filed.
While users of online arenas such as the open source software site
slashdot.org bristle with indignation, Aharonian’s newsletters are pooling
hard facts about prior art. The latest letter cites Ted Nelson’s Xanadu
hypertext project of the early 1970s—documented at www.xanadu.net
—and Roy Rada’s book Hypertext: From Text to Expertext. What will
really haunt BT, Aharonian says, is a paper by IBM on hypertext editing using
mainframes and terminals, which Nelson presented at a conference held in 1969 at
the University of Illinois, which was later to create the first Internet
browser, Mosaic.
