From what I can tell, the patent covers converting a piece of text into a hyperlink using regular expressions. There's a good chance that there might be prior a

From what I can tell, the patent covers converting a piece of text into a hyperlink using regular expressions. There's a good chance that there might be prior art (especially, Perl books, because I remember doing HTML parsing using Perl regexps back in those days). I can understand Apple's desire to protect its IP. But software doesn't need protection for more than a few years. 17 years is way too much for software patents. This lunacy must end.