BT's Stupid Patent Tricks

SO BT IS still loopily pursuing its claim to have invented the hyperlink by suing Prodigy, which claims to be the biggest DSL provider in the US and the first commercial ISP. I'm not too sure about either claim - certainly Prodigy was a big deal in the days when it and CompuServe were hot, new online services together, but as I remember things AOL (founded as Qlink in 1984) and CompuServe (founded in 1978) opened their gateways to the Internet in 1994, and Prodigy followed afterwards.

The way I remember it, Delphi was the first national online service to offer Internet access in the US. And in fact, Prodigy, now a subsidiary of SBC, says on its own Web site that it was the "first consumer online service." CompuServe presumably was a business service instead. That's all right, then: everyone can be first at something. How grade-school.

BT's claim is just about like that. Apparently the company was footling around in its attic last year and stumbled across a patent it had forgotten about for "Hidden page", filed in the US in 1980 and due to expire in 2006. ( Here.)

The patent itself does not use the word "hypertext". Instead, it talks about blocks of information that are not themselves displayed but that influence the display of other blocks. Here is an example, from the abstract: "The second part of the block could alternatively influence the format and/or color of the display at the terminal." Frankly, that doesn't sound to me much like hyperlinks; what it sounds like is cascading style sheets.

In any event, BT read it, thought "hypertext," and saw dollar signs. The company hired Scipher (www.scipher.com) to prosecute its interests - that is, broker licensing agreements with ISPs. It started off by writing to some 17 leading ISPs asking for royalties. Prodigy is the first to get sued. BT has magnanimously said it won't be pursuing the many millions of Web users who use hyperlinks every day.

You have to wonder what's wrong with the bean counters up there at the top of the BT tower. Haven't they got enough to worry about what with increasing competition, shrinking revenues, burgeoning debt, the fact that long distance revenues one day soon will collapse to near zero, and the other fact that most of BT's customers loathe it to pieces? How shall we save this company? you imagine them asking each other as they gently revolve in the restaurant that's closed to the public. I know: let's try suing some ISPs!

Let's assume that BT's 1976 patent really refers to hyperlinks. Tim Berners-Lee, if you ever meet him, talks at hyperspeed, but he didn't invent the Web until 1989, when he wrote the first version on his NeXT machine at CERN. Doesn't matter. What does matter is: did anyone come up with hyperlinks before 1976? Was there what's known as "prior art"?

Shortly after BT first announced its ownership, in June 2000, ZDNet journalist Rupert Goodwins wrote a wonderful little piece ( here) answering just this question. Goodwins figures that the first hypertext novel was Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, published in 1760.

If you want computers, however, you'll have to wait until 1945, when Vannevar Bush published his seminal essay "As We May Think," ( here). In it, he envisioned a kind of personal, hyperlinked library he called a "Memex". Based around an ordinary desk, the Memex involved retaining data, and creating personal trails between one chunk of data and another. Some of the details of the essay have dated as laughably as the TV screens in science fiction movies from the 1950s: Bush imagined all that data would be stored on microfilm, and he talked about carrying a camera that took endless numbers of still photos. He was not able to foresee digital storage or video, nor of networking to make the Memex a universe of knowledge instead of a personal collection.

But it is no accident that we can look back at it now and say it was prescient; "As We May Think" was enormously influential on two generations of computer scientists, including Doug Engelbart, who built the first hypertext system in the 1960s and Ted Nelson, who began his Project Xanaduin 1960. There was also Gopher, a text-based menuing system developed in 1991 at the University of Minnesota as a way of making it easier to navigate related information on the Net. Until graphical interfaces made the Web the (relatively) usable experience it is now, Gopher looked pretty good ( Here).

Note we don't see BT suing the University of Minnesota.

So, what's going to happen? If BT persists, it's going find itself in court arguing with a load of experts on the history of hypertext. It will - or at least it should - lose. It will have spent a lot of money to learn its patent is worthless (shame on the US Patent Office!) and in the process alienated a lot of people. If, instead, it had announced its discovery and grandly turned the patent over to the W3C or the public, the gesture would have cost it nothing, and everyone would have admired its good corporate citizenship. See how PR works, BT?

Previous Columns
Preserving our freedoms
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Net is the mother of re-invention
Save the Cookie
n et.wars: Digital rights and the new era of world terrorism

Wendy M. Grossman, whose Web site is pelicancross ing.net, is author of From Anarchy to Power: the Net Comes of Age (NYU Press, 2001), net.wars (NYU Press, 1998), and the Daily Telegraph A-Z Guide to the Internet (Macmillan, 2001). She can be reached at this email address.