Patenting everything from scrollbars to the internet itself, opportunistic individuals and corporations are making a mess of the nation's legal system with claims teetering on the bizarre. The latest are debates over the ownership of browser plugins, and claims by some that they own the domain system itself.

British Telecom shocked the world when they began claiming that the company invented the hyperlink. British Telecom's lawyers argued that the company invented hyperlinks in 1976, therefore every website that utilized the idea in the U.S. should be subject to a licensing fee.

Bob Bemer, whose 1960 work forms the foundation of many modern computer systems, had plenty to say about British Telecom's attempts. Bemer, now 82, came up with the notion of the "escape sequence" while working as IBM's chief of programming standards. Escape also appears in every hyperlink as a slash (/); without Bemer's slash, there would be no hyperlinks, he argues.

Such is the chicken and the egg battle in the world of patent law and invention. Add corporate legal departments with deep pockets to the mix; shake and stir, and you'll usually wind up with a convoluted mess that is the world's intellectual property debate.

British Telecom's case was eventually thrown out; but imagine a world where corporations claim intellectual ownership of such mundane programming concepts as hyperlinks and scrollbars. That world has become very real in the States, and is also the center of a growing battle in the UK.

Arlene McCarthy, Member of the European Parliament, has been supporting a law that could give corporations the key to the software kingdom. Backed by many corporations, McCarthy has been a self-proclaimed supporter of improving UK e-commerce. To that end, she believes apparently that such a mission can be accomplished by turning the country's intellectual property laws on their head.

In Europe, 30,000 "software patents" on fairly mundane concepts have already been granted. Though they currently lack any legal legs to stand on, such patents could be enforceable if McCarthy gets her way. Simple 'public domain' programming ideas (as simple as the ability to scroll within a window) would suddenly require licensing fees, and programmers would now have to pay patent-holders money every time they included them; even in self-developed applications.

According to Swiss system manager and programmer Tobias Oetiker, whose various network monitoring tools are used by ISP's worldwide, the push could spell certain doom for many programmers in the UK. To Oetiker, the ludicrous concept is akin to licensing 'sitting on a bench in the park and watching children play'; in the real world, the courts would laugh in the face of such a proposal. Given the often complex nature of programming and the limited understanding of technology by lawmakers, somehow the idea is managing to move forward.

"Unfortunately with software 'inventions/patents' the specialist knowledge required in order to decide if an idea is realy revolutionary or just stupid is very high," says Oetiker. He argues that there's nothing really to be gained technologically from such a move; it's simply a quest for cash from the business sector. "In many countries this has been understood at some point, therefore many places have laws against patenting mathematical algorithms (software falls into this category)."

In the UK, the vote to "harmonize" the UK patent system has been delayed until April of this year. Here in the states, the debate over concept patents continues to teeter into the ridiculous completely on its own - without the help of politicians.

This week one patent lawyer unveiled claims he owns US patent 6,671,714 - "Method, apparatus and business system for online communications with online and offline recipients". The lawyer is suing both Network Solutions and Register.com, relying on semantics and double-speak in the hopes of grabbing an undeserved piece of the domain pie. As the Register explores in more detail, the claim is incredibly broad but focuses on .name domains in the hopes of helping it seem relevant.

While Microsoft has been known to lay claims to ridiculous patents themselves (such as common and long-used components of instant messaging), they recently found themselves on the other side of the equation. Last week a Federal Judge upheld a $512m patent verdict against Microsoft by Eolas Technologies and the University of California.

Eolas's patent once again focuses on a ridiculously broad concept: the ability to launch in-browser applications (viewers, media-players, etc.). That's fine if you're not a big fan of Microsoft, but won't be so fine if the legal argument is directed toward the less affluent manufacturers of your browser of choice.

Patent disputes (legitimate complaints or otherwise) have grown more and more heated with the web's evolution. Unisys's claims to own gif compression (and subsequent attempts to secure royalties), Amazon's claims on "one-click ordering"; the list of examples are endless, and that's before one even takes a peek at the battle going on between SCO (formerly Caldera) and the Linux community. SCO, owners of Unix, have been busy threatening end users and distributors for using Linux sans licensing fees, because it contains bits of Unix code. That fight even extended overseas this week with SCO extending their licensing "offers" throughout Europe.

However it's the ridiculously broad concept patents that have become an all too common occurrence. In fact the end result has seen reasonable companies rushing to file their own ridiculous patents in order to simply protect themselves. Surely a battle over the ownership of "oxygen inhalation and processing for energy expenditure and organ maintenance" is on deck?