BT's court case against ISP Prodigy Communications over the hyperlink patent will begin on 11 February 2002 in New York. BT is claiming unspecified damages for alleged infringement of its patent, which covers the basic navigation method on which the Web is built. ... The patent, number 4,873,662, was issued to BT in America in 1989 and expires in 2006. The company said it only discovered the patent in a routine trawl through its own patents four years ago. But the priority date for the patent is July 1976, which means that for the patent to be successfully challenged a company must show prior art before that date, according to Gregory Aharonian, editor of the Internet Patent News Service and a vocal critic of what he calls poor-quality patents. |
