British Telecommunications recently claimed in a US federal court that it owned the patent on hyperlinks, the foundation for navigation on the world wide web. The patent, which was first filed in 1976, reduced the need for mainframe users at the time to remember the full address (or location) of a linked page.

BT is testing its claim against Prodigy Communications, clearly seeking a legal precedent so it may pursue the same claim against other internet service providers. Should the company be successful, it could demand licensing fees from other ISPs, raking in quite a considerable amount of money.

Now, you may ask where these guys have been for the last decade? The claim comes at a time when most people imagine that the current web standards are royalty-free.

Yet increasingly, companies are using their patents (and intellectual property rights) to invest in litigation, not to prevent the copying of a genuine invention before it occurs. At a board level, it makes sense to factor in a legal remedy to the company's problems as just another investment, complete with odds for and against.

A good example is Be, which recently sold out to a subsidiary of Palm. In January, the board of directors decided to investigate "whether an antitrust suit against Microsoft is both viable and serves to maximize stockholder value".

In my opinion, web standards should be copyright-free. But increasingly, there is a push for patents to be adopted as standards, forcing users and developers to pay for their use.

The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) patent policy page gives you a good idea of the corporate pressure on the standards organisations to adopt policies dealing with patents. At the top of the list of authors for the current proposal are representatives from Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Philips and Apple Computer.

Only one member of the patent policy author group could be viewed to be representing the interests of the W3C (whatever they are) - otherwise the group includes 4 corporates, one W3C representative and an intellectual property lawyer. Without a full-time representative for the public interest, it is hard to see this working out for the common good.

Why do I care? Because companies like Microsoft hold patents for technologies that are clearly derivative (such as Cascading Style Sheets), and are pushing hard to have commercial products such as .NET adopted as "standards". I fail to see why a commercial product requires "standardisation". Certainly, Macromedia's Flash has done very well without it.

If you agree, write to the W3C and let them know what you think. I do not believe that commercial products require recommendation by our "standards" organisations, and in my opinion, neither should you. Let's keep the web free if we can, even though the likes of British Telecommunications would have it otherwise.