Prior Art On SBC's Ridiculous Patent Claim

from the like-that-was-difficult dept

Last week we posted the story about SBC threatening to make use of a ridiculous patent on consistent navigation elements in a web page, such as frames or a navbar. Dan Gillmor asked readers for examples of prior art, and they came through. I imagine that shouldn't surprise most people. Two interesting things mentioned in the article. (1) SBC owns Prodigy, which was sued by BT after BT thought they owned the patent on hyperlinks. Clearly, as Gillmor points out, SBC learned the wrong lesson out of that experience. (2) It is not hard to realize that a vast majority of websites out there violate this patent in some way or another. Included on that list, though, is the US Patent & Trademark Office's own website. Think the patent system needs to be reformed?

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