IP: Re:BT claims rights to hyperlink patent

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

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>Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 17:22:39 -0600
>To: farber@cis.upenn.edu, ip-sub-1@majordomo.pobox.com
>From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
>Subject: Re: IP: Re:BT claims rights to hyperlink patent
>
>Fancy legal arguments aside, there is strong reason to believe that the BT 
>patent is not applicable to the World Wide Web in any case. The patent's 
>claims cover a system in which formatting information and links -- that 
>is, "markup information" -- are transmitted separately from the text of 
>the document.
>
>As any Web desginer knows, HTML (which is based on SGML) mixes these two 
>parts together -- the "tags" which indicate italics, text size, etc. are 
>part of the same transmission as the raw text. For this reason, it appears 
>that the fuss over BT's patent is a false alarm. It is unlikely to cover 
>the Web at all.
>
>--Brett Glass
>