BT will on Monday begin a hearing of preliminary issues at a
federal court in New York to show that a patent it filed in 1976
applies to the standard use of hyperlinks.08 Feb 2002
BT is suing Prodigy, the first commercial ISP in the US. If BT wins this test case it could be entitled to enormous damages against countless businesses in the US.
The US is the only country where BT still holds a patent on its hyperlink technology. The patent expires in October 2006. Although it was filed years before the invention of the World Wide Web, BT will be fighting against arguments that the invention was not novel. There is black and white film footage of Douglas Englebart, a Sillicon Valley researcher, seemingly demonstrating the first example of hypertext linking in 1968.