Open Letter to Mr. Charles J. Roesslein, CEO, Prodigy

Since I work for
a company that makes
hyperlinks among
other things,
and since I make some links in
my spare time, I naturally got worried about the fact that
British Telecom is actually
suing
you over their
ridiculous
claim that they, not
Vannevar
Bush, Ted
Nelson,
Doug
Engelbart, or
anybody
else invented hyperlinks. Could this be the end of the
Web as we know it?But then I started to relax a little. You see,
BT's
law firm is Kenyon and Kenyon, a protection racket that
makes its living shaking companies down for royalties on bogus
patents. Bottom feeders. They would probably be sending out
green
card spam if they knew how to work a computer.The Internet community has beaten Kenyon & Kenyon
harassment before, and we can do it again. Do a web search on
"+CueCat
+Linux" (what the hell, I'll make it a link for you) and
you'll find that they're the firm that tried to intimidate a bunch
of Linux hackers into ceasing, desisting, and otherwise caving in
to legal threats over independent software developed to make the
CueCat work with Linux. As we should all know by now,
the Linux software that
these latter-day Stamp Taxers tried to stomp out now flies
free over the land of the free and the home of the brave.Brave. That's the key word here. If a few low-budget C
programmers can
stand up
and be counted, and assert their right to advance the common
computing goals of humanity, then you can too. Settlements
don't buy you peace in any time--they just
attract more parasites. Ever hear of a
dog
with "worm", singular? No matter what they offer, no matter
how much they threaten, fight. Your
shareholders will thank you next year, when the next batch of
parasites leaves you alone.So, it's not fair for us professional and amateur hyperlink
fans to urge you to resist a harassing lawsuit and then leave you
to do it by yourself. So what do you need? A well-publicized search
for prior art to strike their patent down?
Mozilla
got help from the Internet community to beat a similar bogus patent
lawsuit (Wang claimed they invented bookmarks), and maybe
people can
find
some more
good
examples of systems that look like today's hyperlinks a
hell of a lot more than whatever old crap BT is waving around looks
like today's hyperlinks.
(BountyQuest might
be a good tool here.)Or does Prodigy need any other help, for that matter -- a
hand truck or two for your file cartons full of prior art? Or a
cool beverage? Just ask. The Internet stands with you on this one
as long as you don't back down.
BT and
Kenyon and
Kenyon may think that they can make you pay up first before
they move on to bigger prey such as AT&T and AOL. But they're
pulling on the essential wires of the Internet, and the rest of us
would be fools not to help defend it. What do you need? Don't be
shy.When clueless companies start throwing "intellectual
property" claims around to suppress competitors or to extract money
from innovators who have left them in the dust, that's a threat to
our economy and, when they attack free communication protocols,
it's a threat to our freedom. In the long run, I hope that this
case will make you as dedicated a software patent reform advocate
as I am. But for now, don't give the bastards an inch and you'll
get all the help you need.Don MartiTechnical Editor, Linux Journal

email: dmarti@ssc.com