The Times: Tech column - BT's patent idiocy/Googlewhacking
By David Rowan
SOMETIMES a company makes such a grotesque misjudgment that its corporate minions almost elicit sympathy as they obediently hammer away at the public good. When that company claims to be a custodian of the Internet, and yet so fundamentally misunderstands its very culture, technology columnists have a duty to step in. So here, for the personal attention of Sir Christopher Bland, is a well meant plea: stop now, Sir Christopher. BT's latest courtroom battle is turning your brand into an international laughing stock.
When BT "discovered" two years ago that it owned US patent number 4,873,662, filed in 1980, the number-crunchers got excited. The archaically worded patent - for an "information handling system and terminal apparatus" - makes passing reference to links within the "remote terminal" network that you might remember as Prestel. Aha, thought the suits: if we claim that this extends to hyperlinks - the code that lets you jump from one Web page to another, then we can charge a royalty on every click. So they picked on Prodigy, an Internet service provider, and 14 months ago went to court.
The case - rivalled only by The Onion's satirical headline "Microsoft patents ones, zeroes" - continues its embarrassing journey through the US legal system, with no certainty that BT will win. "If the court decides in our favour, then that will be nice," Sir Christopher, the chairman, commented with studied nonchalance. Even the New York judge at a pre-trial hearing last week doubted BT's case, contending that the invention "was already outmoded by the time it was patented". Yet BT intends to go to a full trial, probably around September. Meanwhile its reputation takes a hammering through the very medium it seeks to confine.
BT should know that the Web is the fastest and least controllable medium for destroying a corporate brand. As if its slow and expensive rollout of broadband had not made BT enough online enemies, last week the Web was saturated with opinion hostile to the court case. A typical comment on the Slashdot bulletin board encapsulated the mood: "I don't see how this makes good business sense, even if there is money to be made," wrote Nijika. "Alienating, well, everyone who ever will and does use the Internet is probably bad for PR."
The fact that the case has gone this far suggests that senior management must be so riven with rivalries, or so misinformed about the prevailing web culture that they should spend more time clicking around and less time inventing absurdities such as mm02. Besides, a number of earlier contenders have rather better claims. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote about computers that could access hypertext databases (he called the links "associative trails"). And in 1968, Douglas Engelbart at Stanford demonstrated what looked very much like hypertext linking. Without such pioneers putting their work into the public domain, the Internet as we know it would not exist.
Sir Christopher is welcome to e-mail his response. Let us hope so: Technobabble is applying to patent the keyboard "@" sign, and we will charge him our standard rates to type it.
++++
Google, the world's most useful search engine, has inspired a compulsive new pastime: "Googlewhacking". This involves submitting a search query that generates a single result from the 2,073,418,204 Web pages indexed. You invent phrases comprising two or three words, and keep going until the combination occurs on a single web page. "Orchestrator bamboozling" and "metronome dewpoint" were recent Googlewhacks - until their creators celebrated the fact on a second web page, thus nullifying their uniqueness.
(The Times, February 20 2002)
SOMETIMES a company makes such a grotesque misjudgment that its corporate minions almost elicit sympathy as they obediently hammer away at the public good. When that company claims to be a custodian of the Internet, and yet so fundamentally misunderstands its very culture, technology columnists have a duty to step in. So here, for the personal attention of Sir Christopher Bland, is a well meant plea: stop now, Sir Christopher. BT's latest courtroom battle is turning your brand into an international laughing stock.
When BT "discovered" two years ago that it owned US patent number 4,873,662, filed in 1980, the number-crunchers got excited. The archaically worded patent - for an "information handling system and terminal apparatus" - makes passing reference to links within the "remote terminal" network that you might remember as Prestel. Aha, thought the suits: if we claim that this extends to hyperlinks - the code that lets you jump from one Web page to another, then we can charge a royalty on every click. So they picked on Prodigy, an Internet service provider, and 14 months ago went to court.
The case - rivalled only by The Onion's satirical headline "Microsoft patents ones, zeroes" - continues its embarrassing journey through the US legal system, with no certainty that BT will win. "If the court decides in our favour, then that will be nice," Sir Christopher, the chairman, commented with studied nonchalance. Even the New York judge at a pre-trial hearing last week doubted BT's case, contending that the invention "was already outmoded by the time it was patented". Yet BT intends to go to a full trial, probably around September. Meanwhile its reputation takes a hammering through the very medium it seeks to confine.
BT should know that the Web is the fastest and least controllable medium for destroying a corporate brand. As if its slow and expensive rollout of broadband had not made BT enough online enemies, last week the Web was saturated with opinion hostile to the court case. A typical comment on the Slashdot bulletin board encapsulated the mood: "I don't see how this makes good business sense, even if there is money to be made," wrote Nijika. "Alienating, well, everyone who ever will and does use the Internet is probably bad for PR."
The fact that the case has gone this far suggests that senior management must be so riven with rivalries, or so misinformed about the prevailing web culture that they should spend more time clicking around and less time inventing absurdities such as mm02. Besides, a number of earlier contenders have rather better claims. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote about computers that could access hypertext databases (he called the links "associative trails"). And in 1968, Douglas Engelbart at Stanford demonstrated what looked very much like hypertext linking. Without such pioneers putting their work into the public domain, the Internet as we know it would not exist.
Sir Christopher is welcome to e-mail his response. Let us hope so: Technobabble is applying to patent the keyboard "@" sign, and we will charge him our standard rates to type it.
++++
Google, the world's most useful search engine, has inspired a compulsive new pastime: "Googlewhacking". This involves submitting a search query that generates a single result from the 2,073,418,204 Web pages indexed. You invent phrases comprising two or three words, and keep going until the combination occurs on a single web page. "Orchestrator bamboozling" and "metronome dewpoint" were recent Googlewhacks - until their creators celebrated the fact on a second web page, thus nullifying their uniqueness.
(The Times, February 20 2002)
posted by David Rowan at Wednesday, February 20, 2002
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