Brits Lose a Round in Absurd Internet Patent Suit

Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit

BRITS LOSE A ROUND IN CASE CLAIMING THEY "INVENTED" THE INTERNET

[Readers may recall earlier stories of this idiotic claim by British
Telecom that it "invented" the internet. Judge Colleen McMahon has
put them in their place (ah, the luck of the Brits to get stuck with
an Irish-American judge). Let's hope they give up this asinine attempt
to claw their way back from the brink of bankruptcy through a legal
tactic that is essentially extortion. That will leave them with their
sole remaining cash cow -- selling bandwidth to spammers, at which
they seem to be very adept.  -- NY Transfer]

Reuters via Yahoo - Aug 23, 2002

Judge Rejects BT Hyperlinks Royalty Claim

by Eric Auchard 

NEW YORK (Reuters)--A U.S. federal judge on Thursday rejected a claim
by Britain's BT Group to have invented the basic means for navigating
the Internet, in a case considered a test of who owns the basic
Internet technology.

BT Group, the former U.K. telecommunications monopoly known as
British Telecom, had sued Prodigy Communications, a pioneering U.S.
Internet service provider, demanding that Prodigy pay BT royalties
for using hyperlink technology.

In a decision issued late on Thursday, Judge Colleen McMahon of the
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York denied BT
Group's claim that Prodigy's use of hyperlinks infringed on
technology developed some 25 years ago.

BT was eventually awarded the so-called Sargent patents in the late
1980s for a method of electronic navigation that resembled the way in
which hyperlinks allow Internet users to surf from one Web site to
another. But the new court ruling rejected BT claims that such
patents amounted to hyperlinking.

"In contrast to what BT would have us believe, there are no disputed
issues of material fact in this case," McMahon wrote in a decision in
which she granted summary judgement to Prodigy on its request to have
the case dropped.

"I find that, as a matter of law, no jury could find that Prodigy
infringes the Sargent patent," the judge ruled.

Michael Wadley, a spokesman for BT Group in London, said that the
company was studying the judge's ruling and mulling how to respond.
"We're disappointed," Wadley said. "But we're considering our
options."

Wadley declined to comment on whether BT would appeal the decision.

CASHING IN ON PATENTS

In a bid to capitalize on a long legacy of communications research,
BT Group in recent years had targeted nearly 20 U.S. Internet service
providers demanding they pay royalties on technology developed in the
1970s for interactive television.

BT had called the U.S. case a test of whether it could commercialize
a potentially lucrative patent. If successful, BT had planned to go
after other U.S. Internet service providers, in the sole country
still governed by the BT patent.

[The following paragraph is probably in error. We believe that
Compu$erve existed before Travesty.... err -- Prodigy but we could be
wrong.  We've been online since 1982 and it seems to us that we used
Compu$erve before anything else was available. But we might be
victims of OldTimers Disease.]

Prodigy, which got its start in 1984, is the oldest consumer online
access service. In the early 1990s, Prodigy became the first
mainstream U.S. company to offer consumer Internet access. The
company is now a unit of SBC Communications , the second largest U.S.
local phone service.

A spokesman for SBC said the company hoped the decision would put to
rest BT's effort to dredge up old patent claims.

"We are pleased with the judge's decision. She has validated our
position that these claims were without merit," said Larry Meyer, a
spokesman for SBC and its Prodigy unit. "We trust that this will put
to rest these frivolous claims."

Since the controversial lawsuit became public in late 2000, BT has
come under heavy fire from computer programmers, developers and Web
business executives, a group that has traditionally attacked
technology patents of any kind.

Public critics of BT say the notion of hypertext linking was devised
decades before BT developed its own version in the 1970s, for which
it was issued the US patent in 1989.

In a unique display of solidarity, the Internet and legal communities
have used Web message boards over the past year to ferret out claims
that "prior art" for hypertext links exists.

Most cite British scientist Ted Nelson, who ostensibly coined the
word "hypertext" in 1963, using the term in his book "Literary
Machine" in 1965.

On Friday, shares of BT Group ended unchanged at 214 pence on the
London Stock Exchange. Shares of SBC gave up 3.5 percent, falling 96
cents, to $26.42 in mid-afternoon trading on New York Stock Exchange.

 
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nytire-08.24.02-22:58:42-23973