AltaVista to sue over search patents

AltaVista said it is prepared to file suit in the next couple of months to protect patents it believes it has on indexing web pages, web spiders and other web search tools.

The news was revealed in a magazine interview given by David Weatherell, chief executive of the search firm's parent company, CMGI. According to the report, Weatherell said the firm had been granted 38 patents, and had applied for a further 30.

He told US magazine Internet World: "We believe that virtually everyone out there who indexes the web is in violation of at least several of those key patents... if necessary we will defend [the patents] to the letter of the law."

AltaVista UK declined to comment on the interview. If correct, it could mean a legal fight between AltaVista, which last week shed a quarter of its 800-strong workforce, and the search technologies that underpin the major web portals such as Yahoo, MSN and Excite.

The move follows last June's claim by BT that it had the patent to hyperlinks, the web-page linking system underpinning most of the web, and that US internet service providers should cough up licence fees on behalf of their users.

That claim reached the courts last December as BT brought lawsuits against ISPs AOL and Prodigy.

Elsewhere, Amazon has tried to make other ecommerce websites pay it fees because it has 'patented' its one-click payment system.

Software patents have come under much criticism from open source groups, which regard the granting process as a bad joke.

In Europe, the European Commission is currently considering the status of software patents to end ambiguities between countries. In the UK, software is specifically excluded from qualifying for patent status. Firms have warned that the issue could end up suffocating the web.

Richard Latham, chief executive at web consultancy BlueWave, said: "The effect is to create a paranoid environment where the web is under threat of being suffocated by proprietisation through patenting."