Jachin Sheehy May 28th, 2008 at 12:33 am

Doesn’t a patent have to show a non-obvious use or inventive step?

I would say combining an anchor with any other HTML element is quite an obvious use … nothing novel there.

First, this little company needs to be taken to task. Perhaps a class-action lawsuit by website owners and developers seeking damages for vexation?

And then, the idiots who issued this patent need to be tarred and feathered.

Barring that, we’ll just have to hope that using an image replacement technique doesn’t count as a linked image :D

Eric Meyer May 28th, 2008 at 5:43 am

Suddenly, my relentless insistence on using plain old boring text to do everything seems like prescience.

Okay, not really. If this story even turns out to be true (not doubting your honesty, John; just seen a number of hoax news stories of late), it’s not going to have much impact. Remember the British Telecom hyperlink patent? This one will suffer the same fate. It’s not like the Eolas patent, where the “infringers” were one or two large corporations.

And much as I might like to think that this sort of idiocy will lead to patent reform, it just won’t.

john May 28th, 2008 at 7:20 pm

Amen Eric. Old time curmudgeons like us have been saying this since before image replacement techniques came out.

Sadly, I think we’ll need a lot more patent idiocy until we get patent reform - and I am sure there is still plenty more to come.