Love the Drake

Patently Offensive

The Museum Tour website has received a patent infringement notice from SBC, stating there website navigation is infringing on an SBC patent.

This is simply ridiculous. The claims in the letter are so vague that just about any site navigation could fall under this patent.

After reading the entire 27-page patent, the claims in the letter are taken out of context. It's important to realize, that the patent in many places point out that the document is organized using one predefined document structure (See claim 1 in the patent). The only structure these pages are in are HTML, but the patent refers to well-formed SGML, and HTML documents "wherein the embedded codes that identify parts of the document". These parts of the document are used only for the navigation. But, the Museum's website do not use the embedded codes to identify parts of the document, only for markup and display purposes.

I'm no lawyer, but this should not be considered infrigement of this patent.