What are Hyperlinks?
| History of Patented Hyperlinks 1989 |
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British Telecom (BT) claim the rights to hyperlinks on the basis of a U.S. patent granted in 1989. Similar patents in the rest of the world have now expired. Their claim is widely believed to be absurd since Ted Nelson wrote about hyperlinks in 1965, and this is where Tim Berners Lee says he got the ideas for the World Wide Web from. This is just another in the line of similar incredulous cases - for example amazon.com's claim to have patented 1-Click Ordering. Even more absurb was the claim made in March 2002 by a til then unheard of company " Maz Technologies" that they had, in 1998, obtained a fairly generic patent covering encrypted storage of documents. British Telecom's claim was finally rejected by a judge in the U.S. on 23 August 2002. |
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