NET RESULTS: Why would a company damage its image by acting selfishly and foolishly? Ask BT and Network Associates, both of whom are playing hardball on core Net issues

Corporate responsibility is too often defined in very narrow terms. Mostly, it is seen as another phrase for "charity" - a perceived obligation companies have to put some of their profits back into communities either locally or globally. Such responsibility might have moral dimensions or, more coldly, public relations usefulness. Of course, if it has the first it also has the second, if not vice versa.

But surely company responsibility should take in a much, much larger brief: an obligation to do the right thing, even when it might not benefit the bottom line. And perhaps especially so when it is not going to make much difference to it.

Or, look at it from another perspective. Why would a company decide to deliberately damage its image by acting selfishly and foolishly when it has the opportunity to, instead, benefit many and create much goodwill? That's what I've been wondering as I look at the actions - or the lack of them - in the case of two big companies that are acting in a determinedly small-minded way: British Telecom (BT) and Network Associates.

In the case of BT, I am thinking of its lawsuit against internet service provider Prodigy. BT is suing Prodigy over the use of hyperlinks, which BT says it invented. Yes, hyperlinks - that bedrock technology that enables the Web to be the Web. Click on a bit of activated text, or an image, an icon, and you zap over to another image, page, website, whatever.

BT has been claiming for a couple of years that it invented hyperlinks, defining the process in 1976 and patenting it in 1989.

Hyperlinking is a legitimate part of its intellectual property portfolio, it claims, and therefore BT - which reported £381 million sterling (€615 million) in quarterly profits a few weeks ago - gets to decide who should pay royalties for their use.

So BT, just like the spoiled, self-centred little brat we all hated in school, can just take away the ball and shut down the whole Web for the rest of us.

Fortunately, there seems to be about the chance of a profit from a dotcom that this suit, which illustrates the total lunacy and spuriousness of much of the technology patent land-grab, will succeed.

BT is claiming that a description it made of something quite general now applies to something that did not exist at the time and that it did not produce (as if the estate of Vannevar Bush, the US visionary who wrote an essay in the 1940s describing something very like a personal computer, were to claim he had defined the concept of a PC and was owed royalties on every one built since).

BT's real problem is that just about the whole internet world is willing to weigh in against it. And there are some pretty conclusive arguments for the existence of "prior art" - the legal term for pre-existing examples of the same idea, which would undermine a later patent.

Prominent among these is the fact that internet pioneer Ted Nelson defined the word hypertext and the idea of hyperlinking in the early 1960s. Then there's Douglas Englebart, the man who invented the computer mouse. He was involved with a team at Stanford University who developed a computer-based system called NLS, which incorporated the idea of hyperlinks.

Stanford has a 1968 video of one of these demonstration, showing him linking between bits of text.

A decision to push ahead or throw out the lawsuit could come as early as this week in the US. But BT should have abandoned this silly quest ages ago.

The company has been widely belittled for its claim, and even more widely despised for trying to commercialise such an integral element of the internet (which was mostly built by people who never sought commercial gain from their ingenuity).

How much better for BT to have instead offered its 1989 patent as an historical curiosity, part of internet and Web history.

Network Associates is acting in a similarly blinkered way. In 1997 it bought an e-mail encryption software business called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) from inventor Phil Zimmermann. Zimmermann is one of the quiet heroes of the Net.

After creating his program - designed in part to help activists working in countries with repressive regimes to safely send e-mail - he offered it for free across the Net.

The US government took him to court because at the time it was attempting to limit the use of encryption products that it couldn't decode to such an extent that it limited the encryption products that US companies could sell internationally.

Zimmermann fought the government in a series of cases and appeals, finally winning in a victory that was a defining moment for both privacy advocates and businesses.

Businesses had long argued that they needed the right to totally private communications in order to use the Net for business transactions.

Network Associates bought PGP and developed it as a commercial product, although free versions of Zimmermann's original program were easily sourced from the Net. But as Zimmermann acknowledges, PGP can be difficult to use, as are most e-mail encryption products.

Network Associates found it to be a hard sell and has decided to withdraw it from the market.

However, it has not decided whether to release the source code for the program, although there is an open standard, OpenPGP, around, which other developers could use to continue to advance the application.

Network Associates also is sitting on versions of PGP for Microsoft's new Windows XP operating system, and for Apple's new Macintosh OS X operating system.

PGP is an important program - many would argue an essential one that has guaranteed safe freedom of speech and communication in the service of human rights. Also, it has helped to define and create an environment for commercial internet security products generally.

Many commercial offerings are available - which suit corporate customers - but PGP should be returned to the Net community at large, where it can continue to offer needed protections to those who trust and need it.

Incidentally, Zimmermann, although based in Silicon Valley, now works for Dublin-based encrypted e-mail company Hush Communications.

He has helped them to develop a free Web-based encrypted e-mail program, which is available at www.hush.com, as well as commercial products that utilise encryption.