BY INVOKING an ancient patent in order to claim a monopoly on
“hyperlinking”—the key technology that makes the World Wide Web go
round—British Telecom has unwittingly unleashed the power of the Internet
as a worldwide patent-buster.
Webmasters and Internet users everywhere are up in arms over the claim and
are urgently trawling the Net for “prior art” that might invalidate BT’s
patent.
In 1976, the then Post Office applied for patents on an improvement to its
online information service, Prestel. The Post Office wanted to split up the
information on Prestel pages into blocks that could be linked…
