Here's the amusing story of the day. A lot of you probably remember a while back British Telecommunications "discovered" that they hold the patent on the invention of the hyperlink. Which of course we infringe upon here every day. Well BT decided they wanna score some cash on this and they have sued the US Prodigy ISP based here in Austin Texas (Thanks Sean) and it's actually making it to court.

LONDON - A court date was set Monday in the lawsuit brought by British Telecommunications PLC (BT) against U.S.-based Prodigy Communications Corp. for patent infringement through the ISP's (Internet service provider) unauthorized use of the hyperlink. [...] BT owns what it calls the Hidden Page patent, which was filed in the U.S. in 1976, granted in 1989 and isn't due to expire until 2006, giving the company the intellectual property rights to hyperlink technology. Hyperlinks connect text, images, and other data on the Internet in such a way as to allow a user to click on a highlighted object on a Web page in order to bring up an associated item contained elsewhere on the Web.

So why did they choose to attack Prodigy of all the companies out there? I'm guessing they spotted a company that has a fairly big bank account but is still fighting to hang around and cant really afford a big court case. BT = trying to cash in on easy prey.