EFF Patent Busting - Prior Art Needed for VOIP

JumperCable writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is seeking to bust an overly broad patent by a company called Acceris. Acceris claims patents on processes that implement voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) using analog phones as endpoints. These patents cover telephone calls over the Internet. Specifically, the claims describe a system that connects two parties where the receiving party does not need to have a computer or an Internet connection, but the call is routed in part through the Internet or any other 'public computer network'. The calls must also be 'full duplex', meaning that both parties can listen and talk at the same time, like in an ordinary phone call. To bust these overly broad claims, we need 'prior art' — any publication, article, patent or other public writing that describes the same or similar ideas being implemented before September 20, 1995."

Comments

Maybe they have the answer themselves

[vivaoporto]

Maybe EFF already has the answer, depending on how long AT&T is routing all phone calls through NSA network. They would even kill two birds with one shot, the subpoena to obligate AT&T to disclose the info could come from the patent suit. It's a win-win! What could possibly go wrong?

VOIP Prior Art

[azrider]

Not sure if it was patented, but in the 70's when I worked for IBM, all office extensions worldwide went through the "tie-line". This was a linkup that used the massive IBM internal global network to make calls, i.e. I call Tokyo from LA and the call never touches the PSTN apparatus. Indeed, it never left the building on anything other than data lines. The phones at the desks were plain old analog WE2500 sets.

Re:VOIP Prior Art

[Andy_R]

Sorry, if the IBM system never touches PSTN as you describe, then this fails part 4 of the EFF's list of features the prior art needs to have:

From the EFF site: CRITICAL FEATURES OF PRIOR ART NEEDED:

      1. The system must have the ability to connect an audio telephone call from a calling party to a receiving party.
      2. The telephone call must be "full duplex," meaning that both parties must be able to talk and listen at the same time. For example, regular telephone calls usually are full duplex, whereas walkie-talkie conversations in which a person cannot receive transmissions from others while he or she is transmitting generally are not.
      3. An ordinary telephone and telephone line are the only equipment the receiving party needs to have. The receiving party does not need to have a computer or an Internet connection to receive the call.
      4. The transmission of the call is routed in part through a "public computer network" and in part through the PSTN. This implies that the transmission must cross at least one gateway between the "public computer network" and the PSTN. The Internet is one example of a "public computer network," but the patent does not define what else would qualify as a "public computer network."

Additional Features:

      1. The caller must only have to dial the destination number and no additional phone numbers

Prior art should NOT be the problem.

[mrchaotica]

This is ridiculous. All this patent covers is bridging between the Internet and POTS networks. It shouldn't need "prior art" to be struck down, it should be struck down merely because it's fucking obvious! I mean, it'd be one thing if it were a patent on one particular clever method of connecting the two networks, but the idea in general should not have been patentable in the first place.

Re:Prior art should NOT be the problem.

[pla]

All this patent covers is bridging between the Internet and POTS networks. It shouldn't need "prior art" to be struck down, it should be struck down merely because it's fucking obvious!

I don't think it does count as that obvious. If you remember the earliest days of free internet telephony, the biggest limitation (aside from the annoying lag) came from needing both parties to have a computer with an always-on connection (or risk missing calls).

Companies like Vonage exist to make a free service un-free solely because they act as a POTS bridge. Think about that. People will pay for something free (well, "free" presuming you would have intenet access anyway) because that one little "fucking obvious" step counts as such a massive leap forward in functionality.



The USPTO has made some phenomenally bad calls in the past, but I don't know if I can really disagree with this one.

Artisoft LANtastic could do this

[scsirob]

How about this link: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1161458,00.as p

It describes a voice adapter for Artisoft LANTastic in 1990. I used to operate a LANtastic network but didn't use the voice adapters. However, it seems to fit the 'prior art(isoft)' requirement ;-)

Graham Article

[Rob_Warwick]

I'm not sure if this qualifies, since the article wasn't written until 2005, but Paul Graham mentions in one of this articles that a friend of his wrote some VoIP software in 1994. The article is available online.

In 1994 my friend Koling wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan, and to save long-distance bills he wrote some software that would convert sound to data packets that could be sent over the Internet. We weren't sure at the time whether this was a proper use of the Internet, which was still then a quasi-government entity. What he was doing is now called VoIP, and it is a huge and rapidly growing business.

Break Stupid Laws

[essence]

Not sure if this would work, it would probably just end up in people getting sued bigtime, but what if there was a 'class action' of sorts, where a whole heap, and I mean heap, of people/companies used patented ideas, and basically told the patent office and the patent holders to get fucked. It would take co-ordination, but done on a mass scale, the point could be made, and the patent system reformed.

I have an old Russian book, dated 1986

[WetCat]

Samoilenko S.I "Seti EVM" (Computer Networks), Moscow, Nauka, 1986

which describes Adaptive Communication (connecting voice phones using packet switching).
This book also referencing
Bellamy J.C. Digital Telephony. John Wiley and Sons, 1982

May be something can be found in that book too?

Re:Phone patches for radio?

[Andy_R]

Not over the internet, or using intetnet protocol, so it's not VOIP.

(note to mods: I know I've posted this 3 times in reply to different people, but I maintain it's not redundant until people actually grok the concept and stop posting/modding up non VOIP references.)

Found one!

[DigitAl56K]

Please google "1994 gsm over ip"

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-721578/ip- access-and-RigNet-deliver.html

M2 PRESSWIRE-24 February 2004-ip.access: ip.access and RigNet deliver GSM Abis over IP via satellite; ip.access and RigNet partner for implementation of GSM-over-IP-over-satellite solution; Successful trial paves way for delivery of GSM services to remote locations(C)1994-2004 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

Also looks interesting:
http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/toast.html
http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/gsm/toast-igp.ht ml

CDMA (IS-95) carried voice over IP

[claykarmel]

I believe IS-95, the first publicly used version of CDMA, which was in public use in 1995, carries voice packets over a TCP/IP network from the phone to the mobile switch. From there, the full duplex phone call terminates on any phone on the PSTN.

The question is whether the Sprint or Verizon IS-95 infrastructure constitutes a 'public network'. I would think so.

Wikipedia includes a lot of detail about IS-95, as do books on CDMA available on Amazon, so presumably Qualcomm does not mind publication of high level characterizations of it. I also sat through classes in CDMA at UCSD which described IS-95 in glowing detail. So I have good reason to believe none of this is confidential. EIA/TIA/IS-95 and IS-99 and IS-707 are published specifications available from Global Engineering.

I learned about this TCP/IP network in 1996 while developing 'data devices' to run on the IS-99 (data) overlay of IS-95. In order to present a TCP/IP socket to a handset application (which could terminate anywhere on the web), we had to run an additional TCP/IP stack. That is, our application formed a PPP connection to TCP, wrapped in IP, then PPP again, which was wrapped in the lower stack TCP and the lower stack IP. The lower stack terminated at the mobile switch (enhanced to handle IS-99), with L2TP or PPTP connection to an IP router. The upper stack terminated on a web server. It seemed like an insanely complex link, but it worked surprisingly well because of the highly tuned TCP/IP stack running on the Qualcomm chipset. (I think this connection was later branded as "QuickNetConnect".)

That is, the lower stack wasn't there for data. It was there, I believe, for Voice (Over IP) services in IS-95.