Comment Why is this patent only applied to web browsers? (Score 1) 452
It seems to me that any sort of linked interface in a browser is simply a re-expression of every graphical windowing interface in history - Apple's Hypercard thingy for instance. Or Xerox's Star(?) interface. Or Apple's Finder, circa 1983 which is, of course, a conceptual copy of the Xerox interface. Or any X-windows program interface.
What we're talking about here is an absurdly obvious application of linking which is implicit in the HTML spec all the way back to 0.0 and which, as far as I can see, copies every point and click interface forever. IA-Obviously-NAL, but it seems patently obvious that this SBC patent can hold no more water than the recently overturned and completely lame patent on linking that BT tried to press against Prodigy.
Somehow, we have got to get some sanity into the patent process.
What we're talking about here is an absurdly obvious application of linking which is implicit in the HTML spec all the way back to 0.0 and which, as far as I can see, copies every point and click interface forever. IA-Obviously-NAL, but it seems patently obvious that this SBC patent can hold no more water than the recently overturned and completely lame patent on linking that BT tried to press against Prodigy.
Somehow, we have got to get some sanity into the patent process.
