Judge Throws Out Hyperlink Lawsuit

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon rejected BT Group's claim that it owns the patent on hyperlinks -- those single-click conveniences that make the Web what it is.

Filed earlier this year, the suit accused an Internet service provider, Prodigy Communications Corp., of infringing on BT's patent on hyperlinks.

McMahon rejected BT's claim that each Web server on the Internet is a central computer and thus the Internet falls within the patent's scope.

"The Internet is a network of computers intertwined with each other in order to allow users around the world to exchange information," she wrote. "The whole purpose of the Internet is for the sources of information to be in many places rather than centralized."

Her 27-page decision, filed Thursday in federal court in White Plains, N.Y., concluded that "no jury could find that Prodigy infringes on the patent."

The suit had been viewed as a test case that could have opened the door for BT to challenge other Internet service providers and demand licensing fees that might add to members' costs.

At a hearing in February, McMahon warned that it would be difficult to prove that a patent filed in 1976 -- more than a decade before the World Wide Web was created -- somehow applies to modern computers.

BT attorney Albert Breneisen, insisted at the time that the "basic structure of linking is covered by the patent." Before BT's technology, he said, a computer user had to know and enter the complete address of another page.

The lawsuit has been viewed with chagrin by many in the information technology field.

Some computer historians trace the idea of hypertext back to Vannevar Bush, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, in the 1930s. They also note that Doug Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse, worked on an early hypertext system in the late 1960s.

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