[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] British Telecom owns Hyperlink?
>From the Financial Times: see www.financialtimes.com.. AFX (UK): BT TO SEEK TO EXERCISE HYPERLINK PATENT IN U.S. THROUGH SCIPHER AFX (UK), Jun 19, 2000, 222 words British Telecommunications PLC has employed Scipher PLC to exercise a historic patent on hyperlinks, the technology whereby internet sites cross-link to each other, to U.S. internet service providers, Scipher said today. Dr Ken Gray, chairman of Scipher, said that BT claims to have patented the hyperlink technology in doing their work on information retieval systems, which is used extensively throughout the navigation of the World Wide Web. He said the patent predates the HTML standard that currently exists. "On behalf of BT we are attempting to licence (hyperlink technology), and inviting licences to be taken out by ISPs in the States," Gray said. "We will be inviting ISP's in the U.S. to licence that technology from us." bge/mjh A British Telecoms spokesman confirmed it seeks to exercise a patent relating to all hyperlinks used on the internet. He said: "It relates to work done by a predecessor, The Post Office, which was relating to Viewdata and Prestel both of which predated HTML, and produced systems online which produced similar characteristics. "This is a BT invention which is now used in hyperlinks - we have a responsibility to assert our intellectual property, and clearly we're prepared to work with ISPs to sort things out as quickly and as amicably as possible." He continued: "We're not seeking to deny people the right to use this stuff; we're only looking for what is fair, which is a reasonable royalty based on the revenues that others are enjoying by benefiting from our intellectual property." bge/shw. World Reporter All Material Subject to Copyright *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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