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Vonage Barred From Using Verizon VoIP Patents
thefiremonk writes "Bloomberg reports that U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton has issued a permanent injunction against Vonage. The goal: to stop allowing customers to make calls to standard phone lines. 'U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton approved Verizon's request for a block today in Alexandria, Virginia. Hilton said he won't sign the order before a hearing in two weeks on Vonage's request for a stay. A jury found March 8 that Vonage infringed three patents and should pay Verizon $58 million.' Does this spell doom for the already troubled Vonage? "
If the order isn't stayed pending appeal, Vonage is dead; revenue drops to zero nearly overnight. So are all other independent VoIP providers, when Verizon gets around to crushing them.
A concrete manifestation of a patent system out of control.
One interesting tidbit:
http://www.yeraze.com http://www.vizworld.com
Here's the original 7 patents... #6,430,275, #6,137,869, #6,104,711, #6,282,574, #6,128,304, #6,298,062, and #6,359,880.
It sounds like #6,430,275 (tiff, pdf, text/png) is the one that's the VOIP/POTS bit.
Have any of us bothered to look at the patents? Are they good and valid? Did Verizon truly invent something, and thus, perhaps, because of their investment, deserve some level of protection against theft in exchange for them contributing to the overall body of knowledge? Perhaps these patents are bogus, but I haven't seen anyone in this discussion yet attack Verizon/the PTO on the merits of the patents.
By "us", do you mean the kids and geeks who read Slashdot, as opposed to the professional patent attorneys that work for Verizon and Vonage? Do you really think that it matters what a bunch of unqualified regular people who happen to read a geek blog think?
I don't respond to AC's.
I quickly read through the patent that appears to be at issue here (6430275) and I don't think it's purely the connection from a VOIP connection to a PSTN/POTS line (although that's covered I don't think it passes muster from a non-obviousness/prior art standpoint). The meat of this patent deals with call tracking and billing (starting at around page 5) and to me it stands out as the most reasonable area to pursue vonage. I could be wrong too. =) Nothing in the application struck me as terribly original.
There are many technical details why I think the injunction was granted but a stay will also be issued. You point out one very good one just because millions currently use VoIP. There also would be catastrophic damage done to Vonage if the stay was granted but minimal damage to Verizon (and what damage could be recouped) if the stay was granted but later lifted.
...that I've seen the quality of "professional" IP counsel up close, I can tell you that many of them
aren't any better at it than we are, believe it or not. I've got one of the better lawyers in the field
as my patent attorney, and he's razor sharp and what meets your apparent picture of them. The previous
joker, also a lawyer at the Law Firm we retained, heh... Many, VERY many of them only pretend to know
what is and isn't viable or not. If I were Vonage, I'd have fired their litigators and got better ones.
The patents are pretty much rubbish in the first place and were largely rubber-stamped into existence.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
If it's 6,430,275, I personally developed the same class of product (PSTN/VoIP gateway with prepaid charging and authentication) in 98/99. We had been doing the same with ISUP and AIN variants even earlier.
It should appear obvious to any telecom's protocol engineer that this is possible. It is even encouraged by the protocols.
For example, INAP (ITU version of AIN in the patent), uses the same call model as ISUP, the circuit control protocol. ISUP and H.323 are both Q.931 protocols, therefore they also share the same call model. That makes it obvious (it was to us), that H.323 can be easily made to trigger an INAP call model. Obviously, the benefit is that this ensures that the applications can run unchanged on both the PSTN and the VoIP networks.
And H.323 has been around for a lot longer than this patent.
Once you understand that H.323 and ISUP are Q.931 variants, you see that all the work done to trigger IN applications on the various country and network ISUP variants is also prior art.
Look at the patent date.
The patent was filed by BBN Laboratories (now Verizon Labs), in the mid-to-late 1980s. BBN just never enforced it (or cared to).
POTS, not POTs
VoIP, not VOip