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Google Talk Targeted In Patent Lawsuit
JamesAlfaro wrote to mention an Ars Technica story, which goes into the recent filing of a suit against Google Talk. A Delaware corporation claims that Talk infringes on two of its patents. From the article: "You've probably never heard of Rates Technology Inc. (RTI), and that wouldn't be surprising since the company has no products and offers no services. By all appearances, RTI is a company that was set up to collect licensing fees and pursue settlements related to the company's patent portfolio. Gerald J. Weinberger, president of Rates technology Inc., once said that the company was 'an enterprise based on patent licensing,' and that much of its business depended on the courts." Certainly seems like there are a lot of those businesses around nowadays, huh?
As for prior art, can we cite OSPF? How about using a map to avoid toll roads on a trip? Or choosing from several of those 10-10 long distance services, depending on who's cheaper at the moment? It's all the same process (which is the basis for the claim). Just because the calculation is done with a computer instead of a human brain doesn't make it any different.
Somehow I'm not worried about a legal precedent being set though. Rates Technology Inc. just put a company with a $123 billion market cap in their crosshairs. They might as well be using a slingshot and they know it. This is a blatent effort to extort a settlement out of someone with deep pockets. RTI would never try this crap with my company. I hope that Google viciously spanks them on principle.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Here is the end game of all patent protection laws -- making the attorneys wealthy. Patents are a government granted monopoly. All government granted monopolies take advantage of their power over time -- and the big winners are the lawyers, of course.
Do you expect another result? Do you expect patents to make people innovate? We've been human for thousands of years, we've innovated for thousands of years. New products hit the market every day that were designed by some mom or some kid in a garage -- they didn't think of patents when they started designing.
The force of the law can not truly protect inventions, which is based on thought. Intellectual property is another word for "we want to control how you think and how you process a thought into an action." It seems criminal to me that I can't take a person's creation, make it better and sell the better version myself. This is how our lives get better -- innovating, modifying, perfecting, debugging. No idea is truly revolutionary, we just take little bits and pieces from what isn't working perfectly, and we find ways to make things better.
We elect lawyers to make laws, and in the end, the laws only protect the lawyers. We have accountants write tax code and in the end, the tax code only protects the accountants. This is what comes from excessive government force.
There are many people here who want patent laws to work -- I commend you for continuing to try to find a way to force other people to be good to one another. I have yet to hear HOW we can make patent protections work. We're humans, we're out for our own interests, and that will never change. Why would I want to give certain elected greedy humans this power?
Possibly:
T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,960,975.WKU.&OS=PN/6,960,975&RS =PN/6,960,975
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
The fledging Google instant messaging service known as Google Talk has come under fire from a Delaware corporation that claims that Google is infringing on two of its patents. Rates Technology Inc. claims that Google has violated their patents on methodologies relating to reducing the cost of calls placed over long distance. In a statement yesterday Google said, "We believe the lawsuit is without merit and we will defend against it vigorously."
You've probably never heard of Rates Technology Inc. (RTI), and that wouldn't be surprising since the company has no products and offers no services. By all appearances, RTI is a company that was set up to collect licensing fees and pursue settlements related to the company's patent portfolio. Gerald J. Weinberger, president of Rates technology Inc., once said that the company was "an enterprise based on patent licensing," and that much of its business depended on the courts. Rich Tehrani looked into the company earlier this year, and has provided an interesting profile, to say the least.
The two patents in question date back to 2001 and 1995, and RTI claims to have over 700 licensees of various telecommunications patents that it owns. They have also been to court some 25 times, and in once instance Weinberger warned that a defendant had better be ready to spend at least US$1,000,000 on legal fees, because that's how they roll (paraphrased, of course).
The two patents in question are not for inventions, but processes relating to using a regular telephone to make long distance calls. The patents focus on the use of a centralized database with pricing information for the purposes of determining the cheapest phone call carrier on the fly. The patents do not deal explicitly with the Internet, however, and do not even appear to have VoIP ventures in mind. (I thank my lucky stars every day that I'm not a patent lawyer, however, so my initial reading of the complaint could be incorrect.)
RTI is looking for an injunction, lawyers' fees, damages, royalties, and to be King for day. Google is looking to have the case thrown out.
A copy of the complaint can is available in PDF, hosted by SEW who first broke the story.
In March of this year RTI failed to win a quest against Nortel Networks. Google and RTI will appear before a judge again in early February.
Let's hope that the big companies calling for patent reform manage to effect some positive change. Microsoft and Oracle in that article, I'm pretty sure IBM has sounded the call, too.
And with good reason. An independent inventor has virtually no way to pursue such claims himself, the cost is far too expensive. Instead, patent holding companies allow an inventor to sell his invention to a holding company, and have the company pursue claims. He may sell outright or receive a portion of the profits.
There are many things wrong with the patent system. Patent holding companies are not among them. If you accept patents at all, licensing companies are vital to the success, fairness, and effectiveness of the system.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
They are so gonna get toasted in court.
Following this logic, ancient manufacturers of coaches could sue modern car manufacturers just because they use wheels too.
Different times, different technology.
Their idealogical allegiances aside, Googles still have a patent on highlighting.
T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm l&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,839,702.WKU.
See US Patent 6,839,702 on the following server which clearly doesn't use mod_alias.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
A system highlights search terms in documents distributed over a network. The system generates a search query that includes a search term and, in response to the search query, receives a list of one or more references to documents in the network. The system receives selection of one of the references and retrieves a document that corresponds to the selected reference. The system then highlights the search term in the retrieved document.
It always reminds me of that drooling kid that sits idly in a sandbox and throws a fit any time someone else wants to play with their tiny plastic shovel.
Why not make an "open" API that allows one to move data (of various forms) over the communication channel?
E.g. Google builds a system that works to move data -- and end users make their own voice/text/video adapters?
It would seem that that would be better, all-around, and would move all infringing behavior -- if it happened -- to the clients.
You can construct such a system so that Google doesn't know what is being transferred, and hence isn't liable for the infringement.
Then the company with the patents can, if it wants, try to sue the huge pool of potential violators -- but that's its problem, not Google's.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
always.
Patent holding companies are just a way for in inventor to leverage his work to make money.
NBD
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I've just come from the Unites States Patent Office, where they have declared me the Inventor of the "Shell-company Suing Patent Infringers" business model.
I'll take that gavel, if you please.
Unless you'd maybe like to negotiate a nominal license fee...
Said that the company was 'an enterprise based on patent licensing,' and that much of its business depended on the courts
And just who owns the patent for an "enterprise based on patent licensing"?
I'll see them in court...
Register the editry.
Off by more than 9. Better luck next time!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
FTFA:
"The two patents in question are not for inventions, but processes relating to using a regular telephone to make long distance calls. The patents focus on the use of a centralized database with pricing information for the purposes of determining the cheapest phone call carrier on the fly. The patents do not deal explicitly with the Internet, however, and do not even appear to have VoIP ventures in mind. (I thank my lucky stars every day that I'm not a patent lawyer, however, so my initial reading of the complaint could be incorrect.)"
In this case, Google may not be the best company to use. If the claims cover routing, then that is handled by a thing called the "internet", which uses some clever algorithms to dynamically route "packets" at the "lowest cost" (in a small-scale fashion). This "internet" doens't use a centralized database for this though, as their claim mentions.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
It is patents like these that make me think that the US with give a patent to anything without even looking at it.
New idea: patent breathing, and then you will get a royalty everytime anyone takes a breath.
--
Free PlayStation 3
You've probably never heard of Rates Technology Inc. (RTI), and that wouldn't be surprising since the company has no products and offers no services.
They have also been to court some 25 times, and in once instance Weinberger warned that a defendant had better be ready to spend at least US$1,000,000 on legal fees, because that's how they roll (paraphrased, of course).
This is what happens when you have too many lawyers, not enough clients, and an excessive amount of greed. People will find a way to sue for anything. It is not a question of who is right or wrong, it is more a question is who can quickly profit in this complex legal game. The US has more lawyers per capita than any other country in the world, and you can see the result. The lawyers win in the end since they will make huge fees and suffer little or no consequences from their actions.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Of course they are. This company should have stuck to its "bread and butter", extorting protection money from small companies that can't afford to fight. They can't win in court, but their many licensees' have figured they can't afford the court fight to find out. But they lost to Nortel and will lose to Google, because these two can afford the fight...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Google should agree to pay 1000x loss of profit compensation. If they didn't make their Google Talk service, the company would earn about $0 on the patents....
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
It's called TCP/IP. Time tested and true, it works excellently at moving data (in various forms) over a communication channel.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
We had the Blackberry fiasco, now Google Talk. Patent reform needs a use-it-or-lose-it approach among other things to clear away the scourge of patent squatting.
This one is no different.
These people are too lazy and too immoral to earn an HONEST living so they leach off of the hard work of others. They are thieves and scum. Whale shit is a higher life form than these filthy parasites.
While I'm no fan of Google or it's mega-corporate adventures, I'm less of a fan of parasitical lawyers. Patent lawyers are bottom feeders and this guy is just one of many.
Patent lawyers should be classified as enemy combatants and hustled off to Gitmo in the middle of the night.
The problem with patent's is that they are a blanket. Language in patent created by lawyers, is an attempt to blanket an idea, product, service, etc... The language in the patent dictates whats patented.
/patent lawyer/corporate lawyer/civil lawyer/technology manager/technology engineer/information analyst/. You would need a freakin panel to even have the ability to propose intelligent legislation.
A patent needs to have more guidelines and restrictions. Just about anything can be pantented and in this world of information, the patented item does not need to be a hard tangible product.
Where is the needed legislation to change and modify patent law? Does anyone have the ability and knowledge domain to even propose this legislation? It covers a lot,
So the result, handle it case by case. This is not new news, and will continue to be not new news for a while.
Slashpot
It's stuff like this that makes the big software corporations invest in patents. Companies like google and microsoft don't draw significant revenue from patents and actually invest heavily in research. But having patents guarantees that they won't end up sueing each other. It's a defensive thing and it has gotten way out of hand. I work for a large european company that files lots of patents (Nokia) and we are very much into this thing. European patent law doesn't allow many of the patents we file in the US. Just recently we got sued by this small company from the US. Filing patents is our primary defence against this. Our money comes from selling phones, not intelectual property licensing.
:-).
With the US patent law and office deliberately (this was/is lobbied for) weakened to the point where basically any brain fart may be patent pending, people are patenting everything they can think of with absolute disrespect to such outdated things as prior art, originality or even cleverness. It doesn't matter if an idea is stupid, based on existing ideas and stolen: a patent gives you the right to sue. The legal process is guaranteed to be lengthy, complicated and above all very expensive. The patent office rubberstamping anything they stumble upon ensures a steady stream of revenue for a growing group of companies who, in all honestly, have never lifted a finger to do anything remotely resembling research. Their revenues are based on bullshit portfolios of patents. Google is just the latest victim. Luckily they have the muscle to fight back. Many truely innovative companies don't.
The rats of the IPR industry are becoming an obstacle for innovation. Large corporations are now starting to feel this pain (e.g. Google, IBM, Nokia and Microsoft have all recently had to deal with lawsuits from insignificant IPR only corporations). The problem with IPR only companies is that you can't countersue. In other words, your patent portfolio is worthless if you are sued by one of those companies. It is my hope that these companies will get smart and start lobbying against software patents instead of in favour like they have done in the past. Just today I joked to a colleague that Nokia should quit selling phones and focus on the Nokia Research Center I work for
Jilles
...and what is the legal address of your company, sir?
Actually, republicans are very much against this type of thing. Constantly the Wall Street Journal or Forbes magazine (both conservative/republican) attack these patent troll companies and other tort scam companies. The lawyers behind these tort scams are heavy democratic contributors.
As a matter of fact, John Edwards, Kerry's running mate, was one of these scam artists. He made tens of millions of dollars suing doctors for not doing a C-Section during a woman's labor, and in doing so made the child have cerebral palsy.
Ignoring the sheer size of Google and their ability to pay for lawyers to defend themselves rathar than settle, the patents themselves are not ideally suited for the attack against Google talk.
There are two patents. The first is 5,425,085 and is clearly for a "device" contained "in a housing" that people plug in their phone and it automatically chooses the cheapest rates to route the calls. Think of this as something that would automatically prefix your calls with a 10-10 code for least cost routing at your house.
The second is 5,519,769 appears to be for a method of updating the routing database of the device in the previous patent. It is also directed towards a device connected to the calling station.
The key to these patents and why standard carrier based least cost routing do not apply, is that the routing decisions appear to be made at the end points and not by the carrier switches themselves.
Now, if you make "device" to mean your computer, and make the "calling station" also mean your computer; make telephone network mean the internet; and, squint your eyes just so - then these could be seen to be relevant to Google Talk.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Dijkstra family needs to sue all those 'suers', this can make the trick.
It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft were somehow involved in this, well behind the scenes of course. Think about it... how easy would it be for MS to find some patents that were close enough to Google technologies and then fund the company that held the patent to sue. The more this happens the less money Google has and the more they start to focus on not getting sued again, which will lower their creative drive (think nay-saying exects, ect.). I'm not SAYING that MS is involved... but would it surprise anybody?
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
Same thing is happening with RIM, they are being sued by NTP, a patent holding company with no real products or services.
Here's a good article from RIM's co-CEO explaining how broken the patent system is,
http://www.blackberrycool.com/2005/12/20/001213/
What? RTFA:
"The two patents in question are not for inventions, but processes relating to using a regular telephone to make long distance calls."
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
Isn't Google Talk based on Jabber? Why are they only suing Google Talk?
Don't Yahoo, AIM and MSN, Netmeeting, Skype also allow voice communication as well as dozens other apps out there? Why are they only suing Google Talk?
Go figure...
.. maybe they should buy them out...
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
By counting "inventions" of a country with a patent system like the US, you're counting patented inventions, which isn't the same as useful inventions coming out of a system without the same patent protection. And in many cases, what's invented elsewhere is patented in the US -- that doesn't make it a US invention.
By presupposing that the number of patents reflects the number of inventions, and thus can be used as evidence that patents increase invention, you're begging the question. All you're proving is that availability of a patent system will increase the number of patents.
Regards,
--
*Art
Be it a patent offensive or a perceived pre-emptive strike, it's still contributing to the abuse of the system. Simply saying "we know it's bad, but we're just doing it to help everyone [ESP OURSELVES]" won't get us anywhere. The system won't be brought down while all the players continue to fight each other inside it, rather than moving outside.
If Google had let some jackass patent highlighting, and then when taken to the court used their power and influence to win the case, setting a precedent that "you can't patent the [mouse] wheel" and pushing for more publicity on the "software patents kill innovation" campaign, then some real pressure could be on.
what Google's made of. That is, will they settle (obviously what these turds want) or will they goto the mat, a la IBM v. SCOX.
Based on the MSFT v. Google case, I'm betting they'll fight.
Ok, slightly off topic, but not really....
If a company posts its software innovations in the public domain as open source, wouldn't that protect it from the preditory IP companies?
@vSpid Like, Whatever
I, for one, welcome our new SCO-replacing RTI overloads... just as soon as I figure out how to power my car by burning them.
When I still lived in Germany the telephone industry had just been privatized and different phone companies offered different rates during different parts of the day etc. Companies developed these boxes that would download updated billing information once a day or so and then when you made a phone call automatically pick the best (ie cheapest) phone service at the particular time and for that number. As far as I can remember that was around in 1995 or so.
Why is it that every corporation incorporates in Delaware? Are the laws that much more relaxed than other states?? I know the banking laws are pretty loose, which is why the credit card companies are headquartered there.
It is my humble belief that the patent (5,425,085) dispute will not hold it's own in court. As noted above, the only 'winners' are the lawyers in their quest to sap productivity and line their own pockets.
The '085 patent attempts to teach about routing phone calls via a computer database and hardware. It was filed March of 1994, the standards for Least Cost IP routing where established well before that, example OSPF (Open Shortest Path First).
It will be quite fascinating to read the documents and observe how the idiots in the general media butcher the points the patent holders and the supposed wrong do-ers (google in this case) make.
It should also be noted that cell phone carious would also be implicated in this for they preform 'least cost routing' with in their networks (and as a defense Google might consider this). One could further argue that because the concept, questionable in its obviousness outside an in line hardware prefixer to operate over POTS lines, worked in routing POTS calls back in the early nineties does not mean it holds water in new medium. A medium which the patent neither foresees or claims hence does not teach in any respect.
Lastly the way the patent reads it sounds very similar and obvious to anyone skilled in the art. My example would be that of a PBX. e.g. Office A is connected through a switch and can contact Office B's extension without having to traverse the phone companies lines do do so. I believe that some high-end PBX's back in the eighties had the ability to 'filter' calls based on the number dialed hence some routing functionality.
* http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/cisintwk/i to_doc/ospf.htm
In the U.S., at least, which is bad for our whole economy -- companies in other countries don't have to screw around with this sort of crap. And just so you don't forget: SCO is still in court, claiming they own Linux or something like that. IBM is still spending millions on them.
Europeans and Asians just love the American patent and legal systems, mainly because they don't have to live with them.
Just a thought but, do all these infringement cases recently indicate that there is nothing new being created and everyone is filling a variation of on a theme?
{
The two patents in question date back to 2001 and 1995, and RTI claims to have over 700 licensees of various telecommunications patents that it owns.
}
Er, there is scads of VOIP prior art even for the 1995 patent to be invalidated - open source projects at that.
Fuckers.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Occurs to me that one solution to the "buy patents, sue everyone" business model would be to make patents protect only the original inventor, and for non-independent inventors, the company said inventor was working for at the time, and only the FIRST buyer thereafter.
;)
Under such a system, patents could only be sold ONCE. After that, the idea would fall into the public domain. That way inventors and companies could make a reasonable return on their innovations, but there'd be no incentive to buy up "used" patents, as they'd have no value.
This might have a further effect in that it would no longer be profitable to buy another company SOLELY to acquire their intellectual property assets, since as of the 2nd sale, they'd no longer have any protected value. This would probably incline the market toward more smallish companies that competed more directly, and a great many more small-scale patent-licensing deals among related companies, which ought to ultimately be all to the good (smaller companies generally being more customer-centric, and less beholden to stockholders).
And it would cut the lawyers, who had nothing to do with the invention itself, out of the profit chain.
Oh yeah... I'm gonna patent this as my business model.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The Patent system is broken, yes, but the process for incorporation and giving legal personhood to corporations is also seriously broken. The two are intertwined. You could eliminate quite a bit of shady corporate behavior by making a human being always responsible for decisions made by a corporation, you could make incorporating a much tougher process and have it come with an automatic timeout, you could insist that corporations must incorporate in the states where they actually do business, not just delaware or nevada, and make any people associated with ownership/management of an international corporation lose their US rights as to voting, etc. Make them choose what is more important to them, US citizen, or citizen of nation x where they have their corporation set up, one or the other, *not* both, and not US if they are globalists. Then apply foreign lobbying rules and immigration/alien rules to them across the management board.
You could also reform the stock market, such as placing a time limit on holding shares between transactions, such as two years, to really make it an investment and not a speculators casino, etc. And stop allowing "daisy chaining" of corporations, make them pick a name and stick to it, not 85 corporations with slight variables all run from the same tiny office with a lawyers name on the door. Put the human beings back in responsibility, overtly and openly.
In the political process, you could make it illegal for corporations, or industrial lobbying cartel orgs, to donate any money/goods/services whatsoever to any political campaign or politician, and eliminate the profession of career politician or bureaucrat. No pensions, no lifetime career, make it ten years "government service" then back to the private sector. Then make it so no bureaucrat or politician could accept an industry position that was part of what they were regulating while in government service, and etc, i.e. no Joe FDA doofus getting out, collecting a pension, then going to work for big pharmco. This is just too obvious how this affects legislation and regulations.
There are a ton of decent theoretical "fixes" out there, most or all of which will never be implemented because the system itself is set-up and run as a large scale criminal enterprise now. It's a racket, not a government, and the transnationals control it. That is my opinion, and it's based on just watching politics and business for a long time. The US was supposed to be "we the people" not "we the faceless nameless international corporations". Real big difference there. We are Humans, not Ferengi. Making the system try to work with Ferengi rules has resulted in the overall crap we have today.
The entire system is broken, we had a nice experimental run at honest government and letting corporations try to do business without being scumbag crooks, we tried to let the political process proceed without corruption, but it's time to accept reality that it's broken completely and nothing short of a wipe and reinstall is going to "fix" it, IMO.
I just patented the idea of a patent
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
- Winston Churchill
These patent troll companies remind me a lot of what LLCs and other corporations evolved into in Charles Stross's Accelerando. You can read it for free, but I encourage you to buy a copy.
It's a very good read. Easily his best work yet. I got quite a kick out of the infovore idea from his "The Atrocity Archives".
My understanding of the legal definition of a corporation is that it provides some kind of useful product or service to the population. These lawsuit factories provide absolutely no useful function whatsoever except to the people who own them or are employed by them (probably just lawyers). Why are they allowed to continue to exist? Why won't Congress just pass a law streamlining the process for revoking the corporate charter of a company who does nothing but shake down other companies?
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
It's stuff like this that makes the big software corporations invest in patents.
No, it's not. Your own patent portfolio makes very little difference when you are being sued by an IP holding company--they aren't interested in cross-licensing, and they aren't infringing any of your patents.
Companies like google and microsoft don't draw significant revenue from patents and actually invest heavily in research. But having patents guarantees that they won't end up sueing each other.
That is true, and it's what makes the patent system so evil: patents and patent cross licensing is being used to create barriers to entry for new, innovative, small players.
Big companies have been able to avoid feeling the pain resulting from the current software patent system for too long. IP holding companies are changing that. As far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing. Give it another decade of big lawsuits by companies with nothing to lose and a lot to gain, and companies like Microsoft, IBM, Nokia, and Google may be begging for the elimination of software patents.
Using a mouse to make an online purchase .... Oops too late Amazon already did it... http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/ amazon_patent.html
... Sorry McAfee already got that one ... http://www.dotgnu.org/patent-analysis.html
3 406551
Automatically updating security software over the internet
Use of graphics and text to sell products over the internet... Darn too late again (see Pangea Intellectual Properties) http://www.chillingeffects.org/ecom/
Tabbed browsing... You might be thinking Mozilla or Opera... Nope Microsoft http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/
Maybe "techniques for cleaning one's anus using rolls of soft paper"... I have not checked but I am sure that one's covered too.
Slashbot surely knows better than inventors themselves why they invent new things and what they should do with their patents...
Inventor needs to pay his mortgage and bills, just like everybody else,
and patent is like a title to a real property which can be leased or sold to anybody.
Get over it already, the hive minds of Slashbot...
It didn't surprise me, to be honest, but to suggest this is a Jewish only practice is a bit much. The USA is a pinnacle of greed with her so-called free market capitalist economy. If I recall correctly Jesus Christ was both a Jew and, oh, he lived in a commune. Of course America hates even the basic premise of communism. Talk about evil. :P
My morals are primitive too - mostly driven by survival. Same goes for most!
The tabbing patent covers the use of the "Tab" key to navigate to the next/previous hyperlink in a document, not the viewing of documents under seperate viewports marked by graphical "filing tabs". Two different concepts.
Nobody hear ever uses that one do you? Is that copyright infringement? These suits are a joke.
Because very few people want to go to the trouble hunting down a bunch of add-ons for getting feature that should be built into the product. In that case, Google Talk would fail because of a difficult setup.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
So they patented an idea about long distance calls. It's been my experience that these guys just want a settlement and some publicity. They threaten to sue you and drag it on for years and years because their case is a dud. Pay this no mind.
Why would you trust a testimonial when choosing hosting?
Business model can be either legal or illegal, Slashbot retard.
Enforcing *valid* patents in court is perfectly legal, moreover, this is what patents are for: patent is a legal instrument.
Got it now ?
Hey you just described the RIAA! What else do they do, but have lawsuits going after people that can't afford to fight back. Quite a business model.
Here is the end game of all patent protection laws -- making the attorneys wealthy. Patents are a government granted monopoly. All government granted monopolies take advantage of their power over time -- and the big winners are the lawyers, of course. Do you expect another result? Do you expect patents to make people innovate? We've been human for thousands of years, we've innovated for thousands of years. New products hit the market every day that were designed by some mom or some kid in a garage -- they didn't think of patents when they started designing.
... It is a different world than it was bad in the "Mom and Pop shop"/"Garage inventions" days. Yes, it can be done, but it is becoming the exception rather than the norm.
Patents are not inherently bad. Yes, they can be abused, BUT they are an integral part of our entrepreneurial society. There is a direct correlation between countries that have strong patent protection (i.e. your [horrible] government enabled monopolies) and innovation.
I will explain. Why would a drug company invest the hundreds of million of dollars that it takes to develop a life-saving drug and push it through years of FDA hoops? The only reason they would attempt this is the very patents that you condemn. With the use of patents they can be more certain to recouple their HUGE costs. Without that patent protection, there is no incentive for them to invest the capital to find new solutions. This is the reason that America, due to its strong patent protection and low medical industry price controls is responsible for a HUGE portion of the world's innovative and life-saving drugs.
For further reading, look at " Applied Economics" by Thomas Sowell
As for your other arguments
Your uneducated cynicism shows a depressing degree of ignorance of reality and knowledge of economics.
I'm read your other posts and replies. You seem to be entirely reasonable, however this last post blew it. If someone is sleazy and money grubbing, it has nothing to do with ethnic origin or religous belief! What you stated is not a criticism but an clearly racist statement.
Obviously you have a brain. Use it! You have recited without reflection or deeper examination slogans. Can you entertain the possibility that you are mistaken in these beliefs?
Research is what I doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner von Braun
Besides, "most data transfer" probably happens over LANs.
Please feel free to give this cocky a-hole a call.
p /rates-technology-inc.html , gives a good impression of what a jerk this guy is.
This article, http://voip-blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/voi
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
You've probably never heard of Rates Technology Inc. (RTI), and that wouldn't be surprising since the company has no products and offers no services. By all appearances, RTI is a company that was set up to collect licensing fees and pursue settlements related to the company's patent portfolio.
I personally think this should be illegal. These companies are preventing innovation becase they don't even have any real patents. There's a bunch of bullshit patents built on flimsy pretexes and containing mostly prior art.
Then they go around litigating to make their money. It's really tantamount to extortion/blackmail. They are trying to scare companies into paying them.
The companies that do innovate get dragged through the courts, which is a costly exercise (Microsoft and Google can really afford it). The smaller companies just say "fuck it" because they know they can't afford to be dragged through the legal system over something so pathetic. How can a system that was designed to encourage innovation and the free sharing of information be so perverse that it is now used to discourage innovation and extort money?
Of course, in the mean time the court system is tied up with companies defending against these bullshit claims. This costs Joe Taxpayer, when the money spent on the court could be better spent providing better health and education.
I say that if you own a patent and are not leveraging its claims in a product or service that you ACTUALLY SELL AS PART OF YOUR CORE BUSINESS OPRATION then your claim to enforce the patent should be invalid; that would stop pricks like these cunts from doing this shit.
I drink to make other people interesting!
Ask any jew if he was born a jew, or he is jewish because his parents programmed him as a jew.
As I said, there is nothing racist in what I had said, but there is plenty of "religionist", though. And it's perfectly allright to discriminate on the basis of religion, because unlike skin colour, it is something that can be changed in a person.
Invalid or clearly non-infringed patents get thrown out immediately on Declaratory Judgement by the judge.
/. readers are ready to pass a judgement on any patent's validity in just a few minutes.
Besides, an obviously invalid patent can't be enforced for 5-10 years against multiple companies to collect substantial royalties without being re-examined by the PTO - no such luck.
Also, if you happen to think that all federal judges are idiots you'd better get the fuck out of this country.
What amazes me the most is that most
Even ignoring whether or not the two patents in question which cover Least Cost Routing (LCR) techniques can be blown out of the water due to prior art... Google Talk doesn't do LCR in any form whatsoever! Google Talk only provides VoIP from one GTalk user to another for free (as far as I can tell at least...) I don't know how you can claim that a product does LCR for voice calls when it's only capable of making free calls.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
fuck you! :) Youve got more coming!
IANAL, but I have analyzed a s**tload of patents and infringment claims in my work. The first rule is that, if each independent claim (claim not referencing another claim) contains an element that is not met by the alleged infringer, then there is no infringment. Bacuse of all the prior art, these patents could only get claims that are so narrowly described that they are very unlikely to be infringed.
When you read the claims, every independent claim in the first patent covers devices that have an enclosure and a phone jack. Unless Google makes a device with an enclosure and a phone jack, we don't even have to read any further to know they are off the hook.
In the second patent, every independent claim covers a mechanism to maintain and update databases in all the individual call routing devices that call into a central rates database for updates. Once again, I doubt google has every client calling into a central server for updates. More likely, each client contacts their service online at the time they want to place a call and google can use whatever cost model they want to decide how to route each call.
Fortunately, Google is not a comapny that is likely to pay these guys to just go away. I think they will make a lot of noise until it is clear that they cannot win and then just go away.
You are absolutely right, there is nothing racist abotu what had written previously. Religous intolerance is definitely learned behaviour and something that can be changed in a person.
..." without any examination of why you hold that belief. A pity that someone smart such as yourself can be so willfully stupid.
Lets examine your arguement in a little more detail. A person believes in X. He is discriminated because he believes in X. He decides to change his belief in X to something entirely different which we call Y because he is being discriminated against.He still is being discriminated against because his parents still hold the belief in X. He has changed his beliefs but the small minded bigots still hold on to their irrational beliefs that is perfectly ok to discrimate based on another persons beliefs.
No matter a person does, the small minded insecure bigots still descriminate! So no matter a person does a bigot will still discriminate. Mind you having the mental slots that various groups or individuals are slotted is a way of classifying the world. With all mental constructions there are many ways of classifying the world and people. A person should judged based on their character, not judged on a preconcieved characteristic that the bigot has associated with the person because of the person's membership in a larger group.
Too bad that you have chosen a self limiting belief system. "jews are
Research is what I doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner von Braun
Once you'll face the bigotry of the jews, you'll understand. But of course, the US media carefully shields you from news of jews shooting kids in Palestine...
My old boss, Daryl Rinehart, at Logistic Systems wrote his thesis on shortest path routing in a highway system. That was back in the 1960's. In the 1970's and 80's he sold a package to trucking companies to not only route their trucks but to accurately report the minimum mileage a truck could have taken through a state for mileage based fuel tax reporting. If this isn't prior art I don't know what is. He sold out to Rand McNally which licenses the software to all those map companies.
Since Google has the scratch I'll bet that patent will go away in short order.
How does the abuses of the Isreali state justify your own bigotry? I really don't see the connection. Rather than take the responsibility for your own utterances, you try justify it by saying that it is understable because of the "bigotry of the jews."
I have seen videos of the Isreali army razing buildings in the Gaza strip, shooting children. I have also seen the aftermath of a sucide bomber. A pox on both their houses! The cycle of hate and killing has to stop.
I don't see the justification for your own bigotry.
Research is what I doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner von Braun
well said.. i agree
1) Patents are a constitutionally protected property right.
2) Inventors are heavy users of VOIP
3) VOIP exists today because inventors accepted the bargain to disclose their inventions in exchange of a limited property right.
4) Until the Eolas decision Microsoft thought they were invincible. Most young wildly successful companies like Google repeat the same mistake Microsoft made. It is only a matter of time before Google is held accountable for their scorched earth approach to the issue of taking other's property.
5) It has been reported that Rates Technology has hundreds of licensees. This means that their patents have stood the test of challenges and that Rates Technology has a huge war chest.
6) this sort of statement does not bode well for XorNand of http://www.brightideavoip.com/ who has apparently acknowledged that they are using patented technology and that they are dismissive of such. If they come under fire this public statement may well lead to treble damages.
XorNand, if it is ok for you or others to take another person's inventions for your own profit then why shouldn't it be ok for people to take your property? How about that? It amazes me how people can rationalize theft. The bigger the company the more likely they are to operate in this way.
What choice do inventors have when people steal from them in broad daylight except to seek legal redress? Do you think that any inventor wants to be embroiled in litigation for decades? Do you think that blatant theft discourages most inventors?
Has it occurred to you that when inventors do not receive fair compensation that society loses jobs and tax base because many if not most inventors leave the business after they have been bankrupted by patent pirates? What is at stake here is America's ability to compete in a global marketplace. We must be the leading innovators if we are to survive for we cannot compete based on wages.
Perhaps now that you understand that your taking of others inventions for YOUR personal profit is theft you will contact Rates Technology and seek a license. Most inventors are reasonable when they are dealt with reasonably. Conversely you can continue to rationalize your conduct on public forums leaving a nice paper trail, and when it comes time to pay the piper you can whine about your fate.
Ronald J Riley, President
Professional Inventors Alliance
www.PIAUSA.org
RJR"at"PIAUSA.org
Change "at" to @"
RJR Direct # (202) 318-1595