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Next week British Telecom will be in US Court, in New York, making preliminary arguments to a judge who will define the limits of BT's US patent on hyperlinks. In simple terms, hyperlinks are pieces of text often highlighted in blue or another colour, and sometimes underlined, that can be clicked with a mouse, taking Internet users from one Web page to another.
In theory, BT could potentially demand royalties from US ISPs every time a user clicks on a link. While the revenue from a licensing agreement such as this could be enormous, the case is merely in its preliminary stages. Patent 4,873,662 is the document at the centre of the case. It is the patent BT says gives it its intellectual property rights to hypertext linking. It was applied for in 1974, was granted to BT in 1989, and expires in 2006.
"We had initially approached the ISPs in the US to persuade them to take up a licence," explained a spokesperson for BT to ElectricNews.Net. "We have duty to protect our intellectual property," she said. In June 2000 the former state owned telephone monopoly contacted Prodigy and 16 other ISPs, including America Online asking them to buy a hyperlink licence.
Prodigy, one of the oldest on-line access service providers in the US, will be BT's first target. Prodigy, which dates back to 1984, is now part of SBC Communications, a large US local telephone company. BT says that Prodigy violated its patent rights by using hyperlinks long before the Internet, as it is known today, was established. SBC Communications was unavailable for comment when contacted by ElectricNews.Net on Thursday. However, in months gone by, the company's lawyers have described the effort by BT as "blatant and shameless" and have said the case is "groundless". Nevertheless, if successful in front of a jury, BT's lawsuit against Prodigy could give the company some indication as to how successful it will be in pursuing licenses from other US ISPs.
According to Reuters, BT is facing heavy pressure from businesses, academics and computer programmers to drop the suit. The news agency points to critics of the suit who say hypertext linking was devised decades before BT developed its own version in the 1970s, for which it was issued the US patent in 1989. According to Reuters, British scientist Ted Nelson may have coined the word "hypertext" in 1963, using the term in his book "Literary Machine" in 1965.
BT's spokesperson would not comment on any potential public relations backlash that the case could stir up.
Other counter-arguments include film footage from Stanford University, on-line at sloan.stanford.edu, which shows a 1968 demonstration by researchers of what could be the first example of hypertext linking. In the film Douglas Engelbart, the father of the computer mouse, clicks on certain words in a computer program, jumping from one document to another.
Engelbart said in April 2000 that he would help Prodigy fight BT and its lawsuit, although he has said that he would rather not testify in court.
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