An Australian Invented The Internet

I woke up yesterday morning to the news in the papers that an Australian invented the Internet... well almost. You can read the news here. If you don't believe me, you can do a whois search on the registrant of vuestar.biz and all the information points to an Australian company. If you compare the whois information and to the legal page of vuestar.biz, you'll notice that the patent belongs to Robert Neville Langford and the patent was awarded in Australia on 3 October 2001.

Basically, anyone who uses an image to link to another website is "infringing" on their patent! If you look at their homepage, they even claim that they are the pioneers and licensor of using images to surf the web. Really, why stop there? Why don't they just claim that they invented the world wide web while they are at it?

Apparently, they have begun sending out invoices making claims of payment. I texted my contacts and seeking their views on this. One of my friend replied, "Just ignore." Then, another friend replied that they have received the invoice! I was surprised. I never expected friends in my circle to have received the invoice so I quickly called my friend. My friend filled me up with more details. There seemed to be 3 tiers of license: Gold, Silver and Bronze (I made up the names of the classes for illustration purposes, they may call it first, second, third class for all I care). The tier of license you belonged to seems to be linked to the number of visitors that have clicked on an image in your website and linked to another website. So the more visitors clicked on the link, you'll pay more. I wonder how they are able to collect the click-throughs accurately? It is speculated that they may have based on guesstimate from traffic numbers available publicly through Alexa.com.

It seems like their current approach is to coerce the smaller site owners to pay up first. If they are able to collect $5000 from 100 websites, they would have made a cool $500,000 without doing anything (unless you consider sending invoices to 100 websites a tough job, I got nothing to say to you). The amount is comparatively small enough for any ongoing website that is profitable to make payment and is a more attractive option for small companies to challenge VueStar in the court of law. I doubt that they will dare claim payment from the local offices of the likes of Google, MicroSoft, Ebay or Yahoo!. They surely know that the big firms will certainly challenge their claims in court.

I asked my friend what is their plan. They said that they are going to adopt a wait-and-see approach. As they have only sent an invoice asking for payment, my friend will ignore the invoice for the time-being. They will only respond if they receive a legal letter.

I actually wonder if any local law firm will be willing to take up the ridiculous case of representing VueStar considering the amount of bad publicity that it will bring. Imagine, a local law firm representing a patent troll company setup by an Australian to sue local innocent companies.

Seriously, in my humble and non-legally trained opinion, I don't think VueStar has any grounds for their claims. The World Wide Web was first invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 and CERN released World Wide Web on 30 April 1993 that it will be free to use and no fees will be imposed. An image linking to a website has long existed in the humble html code of an anchor tag way before 3 October 2001.

Since it is unlikely that VueStar will make claims against the tech giants, I hope some local website owners will have the guts and resources to challenge VueStar to the local tribunal for judgment and I'm fairly confident that VueStar's claim will be found to be null and void and with the patent revoked.

If for some reason, no local website owners were willing to challenge VueStar, I've no doubt that the government will take action regarding VueStar (anyone remembers StreetDirectory vs government?).

Bad karma, when it bites, it bites back hard on the posterior!