Posted on 8/24/2002


A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit that could have made the World Wide Web a pay-as-you-click toll road.

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon rejected BT Group's claim that it owns the patent on hyperlinks — those single-click 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."

Full Article:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=528&ncid=528&e=1&u=/ap/20020823/ap_on_hi_te/hyperlink_patent_2