The ownership of hyperlinks on the Internet is being tested by British Telecom in a US court.
The company claims a US patent it filed in the 1970s covers the use of the technology. Granted in 1989, the patent is due to run out in 2006.
Hyperlinks allow users to move between documents or Web pages by clicking on a section of text, sometimes underlined.
Patent No 4,873,662 was discovered in 2000 when the company was conducting a routine update of its patents. It was originally part of the Prestel information network, an early system of networked computers.
If BT is successful, it could demand royalties from Internet Service Providers for using the technology for the past six years.
The company’s first target is Prodigy, one of the oldest ISPs in the US. BT claims Prodigy used the hyperlink technology before its use on the Internet as we know it today.
However, there are claims that hypertext links were used before BT filed its patent. Film footage from Stanford University shows the 1968 demonstration of an online system and its innovations, such as the mouse, dynamic file linking and hypertext technology.
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