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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? "
Down with Vonage!! I had the service for 11 months. First 3 months was great, but then nothing but trouble after I deployed to the Gulf for 6 months. My wife tried to call them repeatedly to have it fixed and they kept blaming my ISP which after I got home I ruled out as it happened on my COMCAST, neighbors ATT, and Clearwire in local area. I could see one ISP being the problem, but not 3, and after I called again they said I wasn't qualified to make such assumptions. Funny, I can sure manage to make UHF/VHF, and SAT links and manage the LAN on a US Guided Missile Cruiser, but I wasn't technically smart enough to call the bullshit flag on the blame they focused on my ISP. Further, when the 10 month mark rolled around, I had military orders requiring me to move and at the time it was to a place I wouldn't have broadband, or hell, access at all, and they tried to pressure me into keeping the service and singing another year anyway. They just didn't get the fact that small islands sometimes don't have access. Then, they argued with me about how I owed them an early cancellation fee even though I was also canceling due to shitty service THEY couldn't fix. I had to end up also telling them a lie that I was not married, and I had no family who could make use of the account before they would close it. I had read horror stories at the time about people who had went over the 12 month period already and Vonage had refused to cancel the account, or had verbally said they would and the charges kept coming. I feared this so I even canceled the card. And low and behold, I started getting statements from my bank who issued a new card telling me about the activity that they were refusing.
You realize, of course, if Vonage is unsuccessful in having a stay granted and cannot develop a technical work around and thus departs from the marketplace, Verizon will become emboldened to press lawsuits against other voice providers using VoIP-to-PSTN gateway technologies? Goodbye Packet8, goodbye Broadvoice, goodbye VoicePulse...
It would seem the only solution in the end is to entirely bypass the legacy PSTN system and encourage the people you call to switch to a VoIP solution so no calls are terminated by Verizon.
"A method of translating calls between the Internet and standard phones, call-waiting features and wireless handsets"
- So they have a patent on transcoding from/to VoIP?, there's got to be some prior art on that
- Call waiting?... are you kidding me?
- Wireless handsets?, how does vonage infringe that?, VoIP got nothing to do with wireless handsets.
Vonage needs to hire themselves some real lawyers, Boies seems pretty good at dragging lawsuits forever.
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How could this affect Skype?
Birth is the leading cause of death.
Seeing as how Vonage is required by law to connect callers to traditional 911 call centers (over standard phone copper) is the injunction, baring Vanage from connecting VoIP calls to POTS calls legal if it prevents those calls?
-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
OK.... so how big (in your opinion) does a company have to be before they should be forced to give away their research and Ip to competing companies?
Not saying I agree with the situation, but the problem is not Verizon enforcing their patents but the patent process itself.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It is yet again another perfect example of how patents actually hinder innovation rather than spur it. A sad day.
I haven't been following this but I'm not curious to dig deeper to see what exactly these patents are. As in, is it as simple as a patent on network->land line calls? And if so, that's not only an overly broad patent, but could mean the doom for the entire coip industry. Or even open source projects such as Asterisk. I certainly hope this patent turns out to be some very specific technology, otherwise a booming and very useful technology will suddenly have the door slammed in it's face.
I guess that will be the question, is it a patent on a technology or... *shudder* an idea for a technology. An actual method for doing something should be patentable, but an idea like, "what if we hook a network to a phone line" should most certainly not be. And I would think there is prior art if the latter turns out to be the case.
Really?
Does Verizon pay every ma and pa phone shop who's lines they use passing Cell Calls to land lines?
I highly doubt it.
Why do you doubt it? Of course they pay them. Check out this recent story on a company that was making millions off of these payments by redirecting incoming calls back out over VoIP, basically a form of bit-laundering.
And, it's "whose," not "who's."
What part of "Permanent Injunction" don't you understand?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Every time this issue comes up, I have pleaded with nearly everybody to make a clear cut example where patents were actually useful to anybody outside of the legal community.
There is one and only one semi-useful function that patents actually serve: they document the historical development of technology in a systematic fashion. In other words, the USPTO is really a bunch of poorly disguised historians and nothing more.
I have known many individuals who have spent fortunes on developing patents, and I've been on the brunt of supposed patent infringement and having to change my designs explicitly because of either potential or real violations of patents. When the prevailing opinion is that engineers should never actually read the text of anybody else's patents, ever, you wonder what actual value they give in the first place.
I used to think that mechanical patents might have some value (as opposed to software patents that are completely meritless). Certainly classic "inventors" like Thomas Edison did use the power of a patent portfolio to their advantage, but I would argue that he was a very, very, very (I could repeat this a dozen times) very rare exception and is not typical at all. Far more people are like Philo T. Farnsworth who had an incredible idea, but spent not only a fortune trying to get the patent in the first place and to do the original research necessary, but also fought a very long and protracted legal battle with none other than RCA and David Sarnoff. Mr. Farnsworth barely recovered legal fees and other related expenses, and never really got proper royalties for his invention of television. And when he decided to develop his Fusor technology, he once again went down the path of patenting the technology only to find out that it really didn't matter.
Far more people are like my grandfather, who was awarded 11 patents, but the only person who ever made any money off of those inventions was his patent attorney. One of his inventions was a predecessor to optical disc technology and is explicitly mentioned in the CD (redbook) and DVD patent claims. I could name other inventions of his, but frankly nobody would really buy his ideas, because in reality that is not how most companies use patents.
The typical use of a patent is a defense against somebody else trying to claim they have a patent on one of your manufacturing processes or products. You then pull out your patent inventory (assuming you are a large company) that is stocked full of all kinds of juicy stuff, and you then go back after the original party in the suit. Rather than melting down everything and filing hundreds of lawsuits, the two companies who are then holding a knife against each other goes for a "portfolio exchnage" and usually swaps patents between each other in some sort of agreements. Think of what happened last year between Microsoft and Novell, and you get the picture rather clear about what this type of patent exchange is often like.
There is no way that "Guido's 'net startup garage" with two employees and a couple of patents are possibly going to prevail against a large and powerful company... even if you can absolutely prove that you have a very valid patent. It just won't happen, and what is supposed to "promote the useful arts and sciences" does neither. It doesn't even protect small start-up companies with a very good idea from being overwhelmed by major corporations, much less an independent inventor. In short, what good do patents of any kind actually do for anybody other than keep a bunch of lawyers employed?
Yeah, litigation just isn't necessary once we all have VoIP phones. That day is coming, albeit slowly. Sooner or later you'll just access people by DNS, instead of by phone number, making a VoIP call to them via IPv6. The telephone network as you know it is a strictly limited-time affair, and the cellular providers are the most scared because even 3G cellular data is SLOW AS HELL compared to, say, the current generation of DSL hardware, or WiMax, or basically anything else. I mean it's barely faster than satellite and their encapsulation schemes mean that there's often as much latency as satellite! Of course, they'll continue to do their best to litigate competing technologies into oblivion...
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I find patent infringement hard to swallow though. This is all off-the-shelf equipment, the patents should have been paid for with the equipment purchase.. so maybe it's a software patent on moving the data type "phone call" from an internal network to the phone company network. Either way, the Phone company and equipment maker has been well paid... and they've found a technicality to sue on.
As far as the phone company not getting their "fair share", realize in most cases a phone call is only a 28.8k stream for them... and they pay "long distance" over the same pipes we use the internet for.... in other words typical long distance calling is ALREADY VOIP and customers are being raped for cost of voice (28.8k * $.15/min) compared to data (1Mb/S for $39/month). Phone companies need to adjust their models to better reflect the cost structure... perhaps we should pay more for the higher speeds (6mb) but less for basic (768k) and do away with POTS altogether.. it's a quick change of boxes at your house for most people.