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BT Loses Case Over Hyperlink Patent
Posted by
michael
on Thu Aug 22, 2002 06:52 PM
from the world's-smallest-violin dept.
from the world's-smallest-violin dept.
Tarkie sent in this Bloomberg blurb noting that British Telecom has lost their patent suit against Prodigy over an old patent that BT hoped would cover the use of hyperlinks on the modern WWW. See our original story or check out the court's decision.
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Well, good. (Score:3, Informative)
Damn (Score:3, Funny)
This is a good thing(tm) (Score:4, Insightful)
By the way the article is written, BT was using Prodigy as a "test case" for every ISP.
Could you imagine? Scary thing is, I wouldn't have been totaly shocked if it did pass.
Me neither. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Me neither. (Score:4, Funny)
Or just getting worse at spelling.
Parent
Cynical?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Nope, you're not cynical... this is BT we're talking about here.
A company that is universally shafting most of the UK, especially concerning DSL (or lack of). And with a overseeing body called OFTEL (should now be OFCOM, not sure) who are supposed to make sure BT doesn't engage in monopolistic practices (just image what would have happened if they were granted the hyperlink patent!!). But OFTEL don't even have teeth, just gums covered in sponge, and a hand that lighty slaps BT's wrist and says "Bad boy, don't do it again" (for the n'th time).
Re:This is a good thing(tm) (Score:2)
Re:This is a good thing(tm) (Score:4, Insightful)
sucks to be his secretary.
Parent
better than you think - read this (Score:3, Insightful)
Not Invalidity but Internet does not infringe (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not Invalidity but Internet does not infringe (Score:2, Insightful)
that's not really a complete analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it interesting, of course, since DNS is not the only address translation required. Before reaching the end server (and the patent says, "Central computer"), an ARP translation will be required as well to translate an IP address into a MAC address for transit across the physical+datalink layers of IP.
The funny thing is that this patent was supposedly dead from prior art from what we've all heard, and it didn't even get far enough. Basically, the judge dismissed them for grossly misinterpreting the patent, never mind that it would likely have been rendered invalid by prior art had they even made it that far. I hope BT had to pay court costs.
Parent
Re:that's not really a complete analysis (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the judge did mention several additional levels of translation required. He mentioned that the web server needs to resolve the relative address in the the URL into a local address by looking up the base directory in a configuration file, and then needs to ask the OS to find the actual physical track and sector where the file is located. (Apparently the BT people specifically said that a complete address would have to include track and sector information!) He didn't even get into the idea that in many cases the data sent out isn't even a file at all, but is generated dynamically by the server.
Parent
Lost on SJ (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lost on SJ (Score:2, Interesting)
True. On the other hand, I've just spent a while reading the judgement... and the following few minutes muttering 'insane, insane, completely insane'. It's crazy.
They lost the case on the kind of picky interpretation of words that, in everyday life, any sane person would just laugh off as irrelevant.
There was absolutely nothing along the lines of, "look, your claim is idiotic, and you know it, now go away."
Maybe that's patent law for you, I don't know. If it is... *shudder*... the sooner this kind of thing stops, the better.
Re:Lost on SJ (Score:3, Funny)
"Look, dude, we know you're guilty, so we're just going to skip the details and throw you in jail."
Re:Lost on SJ (Score:5, Insightful)
In particular, there was the section where BT was trying to show that an HTML file could be constructed in a manner fitting the description of the two-block files described in BT's patent. The BT witness built an example HTML file that demonstrated this point.
The judge rejected this line of reasoning, saying "BT cannot claim that Prodigy infringes its patent, or induces others to infringe its patent, if it must invent the infringing device itself."
Personally I think that was pretty funny; and morsels like this indicate to me that the judge was quite on top of things.
Parent
Re:Lost on SJ (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not so sure I'd agree. The judge essentially says that BT's claim is bogus because it refers specifically to a hub and spoke data system (central computer and terminals that are hooked exclusively to it) while the Internet is the exact opposite. Saying (as the judge does):
Sounds very close to "look, your claim is idiotic, and you know it, now go away."
Parent
Re:Lost on SJ (Score:2)
Write a patent which can safely, without question, pass the test of prior-art and then bitch when someone else develops something that more closely resembles the prior art than your patent does.
whooops.
Similar Case? (OT) (Score:5, Funny)
At least the Onion had intended the humor...
Re:Similar Case? (OT) (Score:2)
Re:Just for shits n giggles (Score:2)
Sane Judge found in White Planes, NY (Score:5, Funny)
What a relief! (Score:5, Insightful)
It is far to simpler to hold the world hostage under the guise of protecting IP and charge a ransom from everyone who uses it.
Remember, the Amazon 1-click patent is still valid! It is not worried about the absence of a business plan that drives them towards profitability, but wants to prevent other websites from using cookies to enable faster checkouts.
Ultimately, I think that is the problem with all these patents and copyrights. If companies truly believed in their products and the value that they provide to their customers, they wouldn't have to resort such stupid mechanisms to make money.
JPEG next... (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's see some similar sanity with the JPEG patent [slashdot.org]
Re:JPEG next... (Score:2)
Re:JPEG next... (Score:2)
Mpeg contains a frame (I frames?) which contain a base image, subsequent frames then contain the changes for some number of frames. The first frame does not require the previous frame to build the image.
{I}{B}{B}{B}{I2}...
All the B's require the previous images to be displayed properly, while I2 requires none of it.
If I2 is compressed in the SAME manner as JPEG and is patented then JPEG count indeed infringe the patent.
Re:JPEG next... (Score:2, Insightful)
From the PDF (Score:3, Interesting)
Based on that last paragraph, it sounds like BT was trying to pull a XXAA and declare the whole Internet as illegal.
Patent Status (Score:2)
Re:Patent Status (Score:4, Interesting)
No, unfortunately it doesn't. On most legal matters, patents included, judges take a restrained approach: they only answer the minimal amount that they have to. In this situation, before you toss out the patent, you have to show that if the patent is valid that the defendent infringed it. Since there is no infringement here, the question of validity does not arise.
Parent
Why they lost (Score:2, Interesting)
Entertaining court decision (Score:5, Informative)
If I understand correctly, BT's patent describes an old system whereby `continuous blocks of information' stored in a databased on a central `system' can be accessed remotely via telephone lines. The interface allows for accessing the data on the system by chunks. The users somehow selects a menu or a link when they want to access the next bit.
The court comprehensively dismissed all parts of BT's infringement claims.First the Internet is not a central system, second a central database is not accessed (the judge writes that the Internet is in fact the very antithesis of a central database), next the data on the Internet is not in the form of blocks: HTML is far more flexible than what the BT patent describes, and finally the concept of hyperlink is far more advanced than what BT described in its patent (basically a `give me the next bit' button).
At some point during the trial, BT's expert tried to submit made up web pages that conformed to what the BT patent was describing. The judge found that totally unconvincing, writing `a device does not infringe because it can be made to infringe'.
In conclusion, the jugde writes `In contrast to what BT would have us believe, there are no disputed issues of material fact in this case'.
Let's hear it for the court today.
Re:Entertaining court decision (Score:3, Insightful)
`a device does not infringe because it can be made to infringe'
Hmm... So we can apply this idea to patent law, but my question is can it then be applied to copywrite law as well?
Thus, something like DeCSS which does not violate copywrite law on its own but can be made to, would not be in violation. A photocopier would be an example of this idea. While a photocopier can be used to reproduce an entire book, since it doesn't have to be used that way it is ok.
Just a thought.
So I'm wondering (Score:3, Insightful)
Same with the case with HP and the DMCA. The fact that HP can file the lawsuit doesn't prove that the law is broken; it's only broken if they would have won.
-a
Re:So I'm wondering (Score:3, Insightful)
> are because they allowed BT to make this claim... doesn't the fact that BT lost the suit
> prove that the law isn't as broken as you thought?
No.
The problem is that a corporation with deep pockets is fully capable of forcing an issue like this, one that clearly had no merit, to court thus costing money. The ability to tie your adversary up in legal nonsense simply because you had a patent, no matter how worthless, is the problem.
> Same with the case with HP and the DMCA. The fact that HP can file the lawsuit
> doesn't prove that the law is broken; it's only broken if they would have won.
The brokenness is that such suits must be defended at all. A legal defense costs money and time and throws fear uncertainty and doubt before it.
Re:So I'm wondering (Score:3, Interesting)
We can't refuse to pass laws just because someone might abuse them. We have laws against rape, and they are the source of many false accusations, but it would be ridiculous to legalize rape on this basis. We simply have to make sure that there are fitting penalties for people who make false accusations.
-a
And now for the bad news... (Score:3, Insightful)
What it does NOT do is throw out BT's patent on the basis of prior art. That is, BT's patent still stands to harass us yet another day.
In related news (Score:2, Funny)
patent (Score:2, Informative)
I disagree (Score:3, Interesting)
This is fundamentally true, though inaccurate (the terms "Internet" and "World Wide Web" are confused here). The World Wide Web's HTTP+HTML elements (certainly what most people think of as "The Web") do infringe the patent on this basis. A Web server provides a central service of delivering data to remote clients. Each Web server provides this function, and thus infringes. The "Internet", does not infringe, and thus Prodigy's ISP business does not infringe, IMH(IANAL)O, but the World Wide Web does. In this way, I think BT should have gone after Microsoft for making IIS, but then they would have had to explain why the didn't go after NCSA back in the days of the NCSA Web server....
Re:I disagree (Score:4, Interesting)
points out that this patent was already defended against a prior art claim, by emphasizing the fact that the links contained not virtual references but actual track/sector numbers; and that the links appeared in a separate section of the file from the main text. Those quirky details were therefore an intregal part of what their patent claims, and they definitely don't apply to HTML.
Parent
Condensation of the summary (Score:2)
"A central computer, as claimed in the Sargent patent, has a one-to-one, hub and spoke relationship with numerous physically separate stations called remote terminals. The remote terminals are connected to the central computer by the telephone lines of a telephone network. All of the remote terminals connect to the central computer that has one centralized main store for storing information. As a result a remote terminal in the Sargent patent does not identify in its communication protocol a computer with which it would like to communicate, for it communicates with only one central computer. In contrast, a computer operating on the Internet must at all times identify a specific computer with which it seeks to communicate... .
Thank God we have astute judges! It would be a much scarier world if claims like this were being evaluated by the general public...
Recovering legal costs (Score:3, Insightful)
While I'm not normally one to go aiding SBC Communications, the current owner of Prodigy, I do believe BT needs to be smacked with a remedy of paying all the legal costs of the defendant. Because the ruling came early, it won't be so much. But because it is so blantantly harrassment and baseless, even SBC Communications deserves to recover the costs they had to spend to pay for their lawyers and legal department staff to research and prepare briefs, make motions, and all that other mumbo-jumbo that lawyer types do.
But AOL may infringe (Score:5, Interesting)
The BT patent comes from a previous generation of technology, which included Ceefax, Prestel, and Minitel. [minitel.fr] Ceefax and Prestel are dead, but millions of Minitel terminals are still out there; France Telecom uses them instead of phone directories. You can click on the link above and download a Minitel emulator, which allows you to emulate a 16-color block graphics terminal inside a web browser. From there, you can access the telephone directory of France or the Minitel services directory. Most of the services are pay, and at sizable per-minute rates. That sort of fee structure was characteristic of those first-generation systems deployed by telcos.
It's little-known, but Telecom France actually deployed Minitel in the US. There were dial-in ports in all major cities. There were even some English-language services. I had an account for about a year around 1989. International text chat for around $0.06/minute, which was good back then.
non-US patent holder loses? Big deal... (Score:3, Funny)
The example of British company losing its patent claim in the US court to a US company doesn't disprove above point.
Re:you'd think (Score:2)
They didn't invent it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, A.C., but they didn't invent it.
Hyperlinking, as practiced on the internet, was described by Ted Nelson, in books published years before they applied for that patent.
Indeed, Ted is the one who coined and popularized the terms "Hypertext" and "Hyperlink".
What bugs me is that, as I read it, the judge's decisions about "central computer", "blocks of data", and "complete address" are all wrong. The patent should have applied to the Internet (by the doctrine of equivalences) and should have been struck due to the prior art.
But then again, IMHO patents on "doing X with a computer when people are already doing X by hand" should be unpatentable. (A generic patent on simulating human workflow would have been patentable shortly after the inventionn of the digital computer, but it's far too late for that now.)
And also IMHO essentially all software patents OTHER than "doing X by computer when people are already doing X by hand" should be struck as patenting "mathematical algorithms".
Parent
Re:They didn't invent it. (Score:2, Informative)
In effect, this is exactly what happened. If you read the judgement right through, you'll see that 'central computer', 'blocks of data' etc. were made to have very narrow, specific meanings by BT, in an attempt to get the patent granted in the first place, despite the wealth of prior art.
Crucially, BT limited 'complete address' during their patent application to specifically include the track and sector on the disk where the next page should come from, because 'virtual addresses' (using filenames or other additional 'lookup data') had already been described and used elsewhere.
Without being able to show infringement of this and other features, they didn't stand a chance. Of course, the lawyers made a bunch of $$$, and we all pay for that somewhere...
Re:They didn't invent it. (Score:2)
I read through it, and what it made obvious to me was, regardless of whether an idea existed before or not, an extrapolated version of it could be patented, but... and heres the catch, it would have to be an exact match.
I, for instance, agree that a webserver could be construed as a central computer. (atleast in reference to a set of data, whatever that set is.. slashdot posts? whatever). But since BT used that to differentiate themselves from prior-art it chained them to the narrow interpretation.
Had it not been used to avoid conflict with prior art perhaps it could have been contrued in the wider sense.
I'd hate to try and secure the system BT describes though, I don't think I'd want hackers to know what sector on my HD contains what... (and how the hell do you secure that nicely?)