BT sues for hyperlink millions
British Telecom claimed in a New York court that it owns the patent on hyperlinks - the single-click conveniences that underlie the internet - and should get paid for their daily use by millions of people.
But a federal judge with a laptop on her desk warned that it may be difficult to prove that a patent filed in 1976, more than a decade before the World Wide Web’s invention, somehow applies today.
‘‘The language is archaic,’’ Judge Colleen McMahon said yesterday. ‘‘It’s like reading Old English.’’
She said comparing a 1976 computer with a 2002 computer is like comparing a mastodon and a jet. And she suggested that the invention at issue ‘‘was already outmoded by the time it was patented’’ in 1989.
But Albert Breneisen, a lawyer for BT, insisted that ‘‘the basic structure of linking is covered by the patent.’’ Before BT’s technology, he said, a computer user had to know and enter the complete address of another page.
At a preliminary hearing in White Plains, lawyers for BT and for Prodigy Communications Corporation - the internet service provider that is the first target of the lawsuit - argued over the meanings of words as simple as ‘‘central,’’ as in ‘‘central computer,’’ and phrases as complex as ‘‘means coupled to said further memory means’’.
‘‘Central’ is a simple English word,’’ the judge said, to little avail, as the lawyers used slide shows and charts.
BT tried to persuade the judge to interpret the language broadly for the jury - to include a computer mouse, for example, as the ‘‘keypad’’ mentioned in the patent.
‘‘It has keys,’’ BT lawyer Robert Perry said.
When they argued over the word ‘‘terminal,’’ Prodigy lawyer Willem Schuuman tried to show that the ‘‘dumb’’ terminals of old cannot be equated to modern desktops that do their own computing.
If it is successful against Prodigy, BT could challenge other internet service providers and demand licensing fees that might add to members’ costs.
