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Federal Court Shuts Down Pay As You Go Wireless
self assembled struc writes "BCGI has been found guilty of infringing on pay-as-you-go wireless patents owned by Freedom Wireless. This means that cellular providers who use BCGI pay-as-you-go billing systems must immediately stop selling new service. For the next 90 days, as they wind down their service, they will have to pay Freedom Wireless 2.5 cents per airtime minute used PER CUSTOMER. This heralds a farewell to Cingular's Go Phone and Sprint-Nextel's Boost services, both powered by BCGI."
here
Doesn't include the information I was looking for, but does give a bit more detail.
RTFA, it was a jury trial. Whoever thought that business method patents were a good idea? "Yeah, we'd prefer if we just didn't have to compete in the marketplace -- please give us a government granted monopoly."
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Seems RCN news is down, why they picked the small fry for the article link, I don't know, here's the washingtonpost.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artiWASHINGTON (Reuters) - A patent dispute over prepaid cellular telephones threatens to disrupt service to millions of prepaid wireless customers at several U.S. carriers, including Cingular Wireless.
A federal judge in Boston granted an injunction on Monday against Boston Communications Group Inc., which sells customer management services for prepaid wireless telephones to a number of companies, including Cingular and Alltel Communications Inc.
The court had previously ruled that Boston Communications had infringed on two patents held by Freedom Wireless Inc., and has awarded Freedom Wireless $128 million in damages. Last week, the court added $19.7 million to the award for interest on lost royalties, and said it would explore further damages.
Under the injunction, wireless companies that use the BCGI prepaid wireless services must stop selling them. The companies have 90 days to continue serving current customers, during which they must pay royalties to Freedom Wireless.
BCGI said that the injunction could affect service to 3.1 million prepaid customers, including 400,000 at Cingular, representing 70 percent of its total revenue. It has asked the judge to stay the injunction while it files immediate appeals.
Cingular Wireless spokesman Mark Siegel said the injunction does not apply to the "vast majority" of Cingular's prepaid wireless customers, who use a different type of network technology. He said Cingular would also seek a stay of the injunction while it appealed the case.
"We intend to continue to provide service to all prepaid customers, including those on the BCG platform," Siegel said. He declined to say what steps Cingular might take if the injunction is not lifted.
A spokeswoman for BCGI could not immediately say who the other affected carriers were. The company has sold services in the past to a variety of carriers, including Alltel Corp. and Nextel, now a part of Sprint Nextel Corp.
Cingular Wireless and AT&T Wireless, which Cingular bought last year, were co-defendants in the suit against BCGI. Verizon Wireless was also a co-defendant but reached a settlement with Freedom Wireless before the trial began earlier this year.
Cingular is a joint venture of SBC Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp.From the summary: "This heralds a farewell to Cingular's Go Phone and Sprint-Nextel's Boost services, both powered by BCGI."
In regards to Cingular, not exactly.
Cingular has two forms of prepaid service (GoPhone).
One is 'Pick-Your-Plan'. You have a reoccuring monthly charge on your credit or debit card which gives you a monthly allowence for service.
The other is 'Pay-As-You-Go'. You buy a prepaid card off the rack, and use that to make your calls on your cell. As you use it up, you replace the card. That's the part that will be affected by this ruling.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
The patents is question are 5,722,067 filed in 1998 and 6,157,823 filed in 2000.
http://www.quinnemanuel.com/news/headline_detail.a spx?recid=9
GoPhone, as it currently is, is a rebranding of several of AT&T, Cingular, BellSouth, etc's, old prepaid plans, plus Cingular and AT&T's GSM prepaid plans. I have a GoPhone PAYG SIM, and I can tell you the fact it works on regular GSM phones and the fact the phone knows the real number of the telephone when it does means it's highly unlikely that their current PAYG or PYP plans actually infringe upon the patents. The patents themselves generally cover a myriad of ways of implementing prepaid service, generally by either putting a bogus phone number in the cellphone, which forces incoming calls to be routed via a third party and makes it easy to identify prepaid callers, or by having the phone programmed to make 800 calls and route outgoing calls via that.
This probably explains Cingular's insistance that this will not affect the majority of their prepaid customers.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
is affected, which means the old ATT TDMA people "free2go" plan.
The GMS Pay as you go, and pick your plan are not affected.
The patten isn't about pay as you go exactly. It is about a process for tabulating minutes used and controling the phone without using access codes and such. It apears that some pay as you go phones use this proccesss while other don't. I think the patten ws issued around 94 or so but i cannot seam to find the information about it again.
BTW, i found the information in another link in the posts here. One of them pointed to the patten.
We on planet Earth call it GSM.
I strongly feel that patents should be tied to one's ability to implement the idea.
No offense, but why did this get modded "insightful"? You have a good idea, but missed the target a bit...
In this situation, the problem doesn't have anything to do with ability to implement (I've "implemented" a not-too-dissimilar system to keep track of my 5GB-per-month GigaNews usage, to throttle myself so I don't run out before the new month starts). Any moron capable of installing MySQL and writing a few queries could implement the idea in this patent.
The problem here, instead, involves the truly trivial nature of what the patent covers. They may have wrapped it in a shiny IT-esque gift bag, but the patent covers the oh-so-"novel" idea that you can bill someone for time used. Purely physical contractors have had that concept covered for millenia.
The patent office needs to get its head out of its ass regarding what counts as prior art. Just because a ubiquitously used idea or device doesn't have the word "wireless" or "database" or even "electric" in its name, doesn't make the addition of those words any more innovative.