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?

Comments

Yawn... Nothing here, move along please.

[XorNand]

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.

Are you kidding me? It's called "least cost call routing" and is pretty much a no-brainer. The VoIP service company that I run has six different trunks from four carriers for redundancy reasons. It didn't take long for it to dawn on me that maybe I should take advantage of the different rates to different destinations. One carrier might be cheaper for calls to Italy, while another is cheaper to Japan.

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.

Re:Yawn... Nothing here, move along please.

[isdnip]

OSPF? You're not even touching a huge well of prior art that predates OSPF by years! This goes right back to telephone network switches and direct distance dialing. By the late 1970s, most major PBX systems had least-cost routing features, some more sophisticated than that named in the Weinberger "patent". And after Equal Access created 10xxx codes, there were boxes that updated tables to decide which 10xxx was cheapest for any given call. All of this directly wipes out the patent in question. (And yes, I've offered information about this to a high-placed person in Google.)

However, the VoIP service doesn't even seem to infringe upon the patent itself, as if the patent were valid, so the case fails on those grounds too. This looks like a blatant attempt to use a trash patent against a deep-pocketed victim in hopes of getting quick cash, rather than dealing with a lawsuit that might somehow upset investors.

Seems like a difficult case for them...

[linuxtelephony]

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.