THE lengths big business will go to raise some extra cash has been taken on a step by BT.

Last week, BT (www.bt.com) opened a court case in a US federal court in White Plains, New York, where it seeks to protect a patent that it says it holds over hyperlinks.

The internet depends on some very simple ideas and technologies.

One of these is the ability to create hyperlinks from one page to any other page.

There's no need to ask permission from the owner of the website you wish to link to -- after all, since they have created a web page, they are in effect inviting people to link to it. That's the whole point.

Now BT, after a review of all its patents, is looking to retain control over the use of hyperlinks in the United States.

In theory, if BT won its court action, it could impose some kind of "tax" on every use of hyperlinks in the United States.

Since suing every website owner might be problematic, the company is instead suing what might seem like an easy target, the Internet Service Providers.

It's difficult to follow the logic of this choice. The ISPs do not, as a rule, provide a hyperlinking service to their customers.

Search engines provide more of a linking service, yet BT have not looked at tackling Yahoo, Google, AOL or Microsoft.

If BT somehow win their case, which many people find unlikely, just imagine the outcry and antipathy towards BT from the internet community. It only paints BT as a company that understands little about, and cares even less for, the wider community of net users.

A BT spokesman says: "We are keen to defend our intellectual property rights, and we believe we have a case here."

In effect the only people who look set to make any money out of this are the lawyers, no surprise there then.