SEARCH NEWS:

 

British Telecom Claims Hyperlink Patent

Today's Financial Times (FT) said that BT, which has held the US patent for some 14 years, has made no attempt to exploit its patent commercially, despite the fact that it expires in 2006.

That may change, however, as the paper said that BT only rediscovered the existence of the patent during a recent trawl of intellectual copyright databases. The last few weeks have seen the international carrier sending letters to various Internet service providers (ISPs) across the US.

The FT also reported that BT has secured the services of QED, a company that specializes in generating revenues for firms who have rights to patents they own.

Newsbytes understands that the patent was filed in 1986 when BT was experimenting with an enhanced version of its Prestel viewdata service, which was originally launched in the late 1970s.

Patents were also filed in the early 1980s on the technology in the UK, but these are understood to have now expired.

Prestel's enhanced viewdata service, which used a technology called dynamic viewdata, allowed for hyperlinks to be route users from one section of a viewdata page to another section on another page.

BT's Web site is at www.bt.com.

Reported by Newsbytes.com, www.newsbytes.com.

< Gaming News