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BT gets hyper on hyperlink issue

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The Internet has been free for far too long, and British Telecom (BT) is not going to stand for it anymore.

The self-proclaimed father of the Internet has decided it deserves payment for the hyperlink technology it patented in the early 1970s. On Friday, BT began its pursuit of legal redress by suing United States ISP Prodigy.

The creaking old former monopoly believes it should be paid a licence fee by anyone who wants to write, for example: ?a href='http://technology.scmp.com/backspace'?Backspace?/a?.

With some 378 million people estimated to be online today, all of them happily creating hyperlinks in Web pages, e-mails and Office documents, BT could tie-up all the world's lawyers for eternity.

San Francisco may be right on the cusp of Silicon Valley, but that does not mean everyone is happy with the situation.

A rising wave of technophobia has gripped the city over the past year, and graffiti on every lamp-post seems to proclaim the disdain citizens feel towards their nerdy, nouveau-riche neighbours.

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