Sir, You've gotten unnecessarily upset. A poor choice of words written in a bit of a hurry. You are exactly right about the reason *why* the patent is bogus. "Clever" was the wrong word here. It should have been "the oh so new, original, never-been-done-before, not even a hint of prior art, concept of the hyperlink." No offense intended to the real originator(s) of the very useful hyperlink. -MC Sent from my iPhone On Feb 6, 2010, at 10:21 AM, Steve Underwood <steveu@coppice.org> wrote:
I would like to strongly object to a story posted on the front page at www.freeswitch.org, about patent reexamination. Its the kind of thing that gets proponents of patent reform a bad name. It says "Did you know that someone actually got a patent on the oh-so-clever concept of the hyperlink <http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1...
? Enough said.". If you can't see the brilliance of the hyperlink you must be a fool. When Doug Engelbart demostrated that concept in 1968 it was so brilliant it went over the heads of most of the audience, some of them making dumb remarks that entirely missed the point. That's pretty much conclusive proof that it was not something obvious to practitioners in the art.
The patent on hyperlinks was not bad because the idea was obvious. It was bad because it was applied for in 1980, 12 years after the concept was demonstrated. Luckily, video exists of the 1968 demo, and the patent was shot down.
If you can't get your act together about where real innovation lies, just shut up. It just makes arguing a meaningful case for a better patent system hard for the rest of us.
Steve
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