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BT goes to law over hyperlink patent 
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British Telecom is going to court to enforce its claim to have invented
the hyperlinks that bind the Internet together. This week it filed a
lawsuit in a New York court seeking damages from a US Internet service
provider. BT says the lawsuit could be the first of many as it seeks to
win fees from those using its intellectual property. 

In June this year BT announced that it had found a patent application
that, it claimed, gave it intellectual property rights over hyperlinks.
The patent application was made in 1976 by Post Office researchers who
were developing text-based information services. 

BT then started discussions with US ISPs with a view to extracting
payments for use of its intellectual property. It is only pursuing US
companies because it only had a patent granted on the technology in that
country. Now after talks with Prodigy have broken down, BT has filed a
lawsuit seeking an unspecified amount of damages. Prodigy is one of the
bigger net companies in the US and has about 2.4 million customers. 

Many industry historians poured scorn on BT when it made its
announcement pointing out that hypertext and hyperlinks were developed by
US computer scientist Ted Nelson long before BT thought them up.   

Source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_1072000/1072484.stm -
BBC News

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