The Ultimate in Stupid Patent Tricks

Prior art from 9/95
See the LINK tag in this browser:

http://www.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1995q3/0566.html)

If you think SBC's case is absurd, wait till you read this . . .
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/investing/articles/0,15114,373291-1,00.html

From the article:

"The list includes an amazing array of corporations: old-economy stalwarts like Alcoa, Boeing, Dow Chemical, Eli Lilly, and GE; manufacturing behemoths like Ford, GM, and U.S. Steel; technology titans like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Cisco. The portfolio of products covered over the years by Lemelson's patents is equally staggering: They include components in such everyday consumer products as the Walkman, the VCR, the fax machine, and the camcorder. At one time or another his patents have covered Velcro darts and industrial robots, crying dolls and semiconductors. He even holds patents--perhaps his most important ones, as we'll see--on the ubiquitous bar-code scanner."

Bounty Quest?
I wonder if it would be worth it to set up some kind of tip-jar thingie to collect for a bountyquest?

Prior Art: WebTechniques May 1996, p.18
"Frames for HTML" by Laura Lemay

Perhaps its time for the EFF or someone to draft a "stop threatening me with an invalid patent" nasty gram for these purposes.

Prior Art
One bit of prior art not directly referenced by the patent is a piece of software released in 1995 (prior to the patent application) by a seemingly now-defunct company.

Called Netscape 2.0, it offered a SGML tag called "frames" for the precise purposes described by the SBC patent.

Too bad the patent examiner never heard of it....