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BT's hypertext lawsuit goes forward 
Thursday, February 07 2002
by Matthew Clark


A case that first erupted in December 2000 has once again reared its head, as BT
goes forward with its plans to collect royalties on hyperlinks in the US. 

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
HREF="http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html">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.