Behind the Headlines: BT's patent plea causes industry fracas

BT's sudden announcement this week that it will enforce its patent on hypertext links has caused shock waves in the industry.

Experts are divided as to the rights of the claim, with some arguing it will hamper the acceptance of ecommerce and others claiming BT has a right to collect revenue from its technology.

According to Phil Freegard, director of ecommerce at Pagoda Consulting, BT will find it difficult to enforce the patent. "There are prior cases," he said.

"Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and that was built on work by Ted Nelson. Doug Engelbart also did some work on augmentation in the 1960s. So maybe there's some doubt as to whether BT really invented this, even though they have the patent."

Chris Setz, director of the Network Professional Association, said the original patent doesn't give BT the right to try to charge for it now. "Their technology came out of the fact they operate in a business technology environment.

"Just because they thought of the idea first, just because they patented it, isn't enough because they didn't control the patent." Setz added that the move to enforce the patent could also damage BT's business reputation.

But according Duncan Chapple, analyst at Ovum, the move is not unsurprising. "The whole reason why people patent something is so it gets into the public domain and you can leverage money from it," he said.

But the real damage, according to Freegard, was caused by the delay between patenting the technology and trying to enforce it. "Why has this taken them so long to get together?" Freegard said.

"It's an example that BT is not managing its intellectual property."

For the full BT patent debate and the FSA's warning to banks on the internet, watch silicon.com's Behind the Headlines programme in the Finance Channel (http://www.silicon.com/a38219 ).