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.

Re:Who does the law protect?

[Chowderbags]

The majority of countries with high protections for IP have been well off for decades, if not hundreds of years. Do you think that if, say, the Congo instated US patent law in full force, that all the sudden they would become the patent producing capitol of the world? Ain't gonna happen.

Those countries which have time to invent in the first place also happen to have time to dick around with IP laws, and generally they aren't helpful to the little guy if the court case to protect his IP is going to end up costing him more than he'd get from licensing.

I'm not going to go so far as to say that all patents should be eliminated, cause that's no better than the above, but I also think that unless a company is actually producing (or trying to produce) a product with it's patent, they shouldn't get to sue someone. That would at least eliminate patent leeches on some level.

Re:Who does the law protect?

[kryonD]

I'd agree with you here except for one minor little detail, RTI doesn't have a product that needs protecting. It's not like they filed the patent to ensure BigCorp wouldn't steal the idea and beat them to market. They are basically running an electronic protection racket that would make the Mafia proud. I mean seriously, the only thing Google will get from licensing their patent is protection from being sued. RTI doesn't make any money on their idea unless someone else needs to use it. It's straight up, clear cut extortion. I too am waiting to see Google take this one all the way to the Supreme Court.

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.

Why only Google Talk?

[origamy]

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...

Patent != Invention

[arth1]

Um, explain then how the majority of innovations come from countries with high protection for IP (including patents) and countries with poor protection produce virtually none?

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

I have an idea for that...

[Reziac]

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. ;)