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? "

Comments

well

[mastershake_phd]

They better come up with a none-infringing way to send calls from the internet to a phone line. Maybe a speaker a phone and some duct tape?

Yet another reason for patent reform

[Overzeetop]

Actually, it's this kind of patent use (abuse) - restraint of trade - that should be forbidden. It should be prevented becuase of the monopoly and incumbent carrier status that Verizon holds on the wired telephone market.

They are not using the patents to forward the condition of man, but rather to choke off a competitor in an estabilshed industry with an (effectively) insurmountable cost of entry using traditional methods.

It's no surprise that Verizon is one of the top ten hated corporations.

Re:Yet another reason for patent reform

[Cerebus]

Which part of "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" is unclear?

Juries

[morgan_greywolf]

This is what happens when you have technical cases decided by 12 ordinary citizens too stupid to get out of jury duty. It's why IBM doesn't want the SCO case to go to trial without a finding from the judge that it didn't infringe on any of SCO's copyrights. (If the summary judgement is granted and it does go to trial, the jury has to proceed on the idea that IBM hasn't violated any of SCO's IP.)

Verizon is just suing to keep Vonage -- and every other company offering a similar service -- from making it irrelevant in the home phone market. Which is exactly what's happening.

anyone have a link with some actual meat?

[drinkypoo]

Like, for example, the patents being infringed?

"One smart decision among many, many stupid ones."

[mmell]

I thought that was just Vonage's marketing hype, not their business model!

Yep.

[russotto]

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.

Hopefully they are forced out of business

[mulvane]

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.

Re:If Not Vonage, Then Who?

[jtn]

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.

These patents can't be valid

[spectro]

"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.

Vonage's official response

[rGauntlet]

Via a Press Release on their site: http://pr.vonage.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=2 35198

One interesting tidbit:

"We are confident Vonage customers will not experience service interruptions or other changes as a result of this litigation," said Mike Snyder, Vonage's chief executive officer.
.
.
"Our appeal centers on erroneous patent claim construction, and we remain confident that Vonage has not infringed on any of Verizon's patents - a position we will continue to vigorously assert in federal appeals court," said Sharon O'Leary, Vonage's executive vice president, chief legal officer and secretary. "Vonage relied on open-standard, off-the-shelf technology when developing its service. In fact, evidence introduced in court failed to prove that Vonage relied on Verizon's VoIP technology, and instead showed that in 2003 Verizon began exploring ways to copy Vonage's technology," she added.

Is the injunction legal?

[RingDev]

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

Re:Is the injunction legal?

[cdrudge]

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.

Aren't all?

[lenne]

Aren't all voip companies doing more or less the same?

How many ways are there to connect voip to pstn?

Leif

Re:What's the infringement?

[interiot]

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.

Re:So Much For Customer Service

[URSpider]

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."

Re:So Much For Customer Service

[dgatwood]

How do you steal something that is nothing more than the IP equivalent of what HAM operators have been doing for decades? It's just a simple medium change, same as any other medium change. The fact that Verizon was able to get a patent on such a breathtakingly obvious thing is appalling, and the fact that the patent was upheld, triply so. It is a completely obvious extension of something that has been done for many, many, many years. Hell, I seem to recall computer modems that could be adapted to do this sort of thing back in the 80s.

The fact is that this is just the old school telephone industry using lawsuits to protect their obsolete business practices and try to mask the fact that they've been charging line switching rates for packet switching long distance service for two decades. Verizon deserves to get their asses handed to them, and if Vonage is going to go under, it is the responsibility of other VoIP providers to prop them up so that they can continue this fight, for if it is settled in Verizon's favor, it will decimate the VoIP industry.

Either way, screw Verizon. Long distance communication is what video chat services are for, and they don't cost anything, unlike VoIP. I don't remember the last time I used a landline telephone regularly, VoIP or otherwise. Even VoIP is too expensive for what they actually provide. :-)

Re:So Much For Customer Service

[mabhatter654]

but Vonage does pay for the lines. They pay to have "phone lines" to the demux box that down coverts from the network to phone company lines to make the calls. As well as for the network bandwidth they use.. fat pipes 24x7 cost thousands of dollars a month. The joke of the whole thing is that they are most likely using off-the-shelf phone company equipment turned around backwards... instead of binding 2-3 T1 INTO their company they are sending the phone calls back OUT in the proper format.... It's genius.

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.

Re:What's the infringement?

[Jason Pollock]

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.