Vonage Admits They Have No Workaround

drachenfyre writes "It looks like Vonage has no workaround for their recent patent infringements. This means if a permanent stay isn't granted it is likely that it will be the end of the line for Vonage. What will happen if millions of phone customers suddenly lose their service? Their own filing to the court stated 'While Vonage has studied methods for designing around the patents, removal of the allegedly infringing technology, if even feasible, could take many months to fully study and implement.'"

Comments

stalemate

[yada21]

Welcome to the patent quagmire. The whole progress of industry will become a stalemate if this goes on.

End the patent nonesense now!

Re:stalemate

[badasscat]

End the patent nonesense now!

There really needs to be a distinction made in this discussion between frivolous patents, patent trolls and legitimate patents.

I don't think Verizon is a patent troll, although their patent could still be frivolous and honestly, I don't know whether this is.

But the whole point of patents is to encourage innovation, by providing protection for unique ideas. Why would anybody bother coming up with new ideas if anybody else could just copy them the next day? (That's especially true for startups, which don't have the money to compete head to head with larger, more established companies.)

If this is a legitimate patent, then Verizon was right to enforce it, and it will only help innovation in the long run, by continuing the legal tradition of protecting new ideas. And the court decisions suggest that it was a legitimate patent.

Re:stalemate

[walt-sjc]

Of COURSE they are a patent troll - the patents are obvious to anyone in the field. The patent office is granting anything that is an old idea applied to the internet and calling it new. Until they stop this, the madness will continue.

Verizon is simply using this technology to maintain their defacto monopoly. This is not about innovation - it's about crushing a competitor or competing technology.

Vonage is not alone. If this case holds, it will effectively destroy VoIP.

Re:stalemate

[eln]

Maybe Verizon's patent is a good one, but it's still pretty sleazy the way they did this. They basically let Vonage exist for years, let Vonage spend all the money marketing the VoIP concept to the masses, let Vonage spend all the time and money proving the concept that VoIP could make money and could move beyond the geek space. Vonage did all of that, and now that Joe Blow is comfortable with the concept, and now that Vonage has millions of established customers, Verizon can swoop in, kill Vonage, and get all of those customers without having to spend all the time and money building all of that up themselves.

So, in this case, even if Verizon's patent is valid, they behaved like a patent troll would: Let someone else do all the hard work building up customers and developing your patent into a marketable product, wait until they have lots of customers and are making lots of money, THEN go in and nail them.

If Verizon was only interested in protecting their IP, they would have gone after Vonage a whole lot sooner.

Re:stalemate

[davmoo]

While Vonage was doing all that work, they should have performed one more task. They should have had someone do a patent check.

Its not totally Verizon's fault.

Re:stalemate

[Znork]

"There really needs to be a distinction made"

No.

"But the whole point of patents is to encourage innovation"

Actually, the whole point of patents was to indirectly tax the population by handing out monopolies to friends of the crown. The later rationalizations have proven of dubious veracity and value.

"Why would anybody bother coming up with new ideas if anybody else could just copy them the next day?"

Why would anyone make a hammer if anybody else could just copy it the next day? Why would anyone invent a wheel? Why would anyone build better houses? Why would anyone bother writing code if anyone could copy it the next day? Yet we find both hammers and immense amounts of free software.

Innovation happens regardless of protection; it's done to scratch an itch, to solve a problem, to do things better than the competition. Competition and communication is what drives it, monopolies and legal issues merely slow it down.

The only real mitigation for the damage patents do to the economy is disclosure, and the only situation in which the disclosure aspect has more value than the damage cause is when nobody would have managed to reverse-engineer and distribute the knowledge in the time the patent takes to lapse. Doubt those situations even exist anymore.

If you want to 'encourage innovation', then fine, do it within ordinary government budget procedures. _PAY_ the inventors for their patents as they get used. Demand performance measurements; show some _proof_ that the resources are used appropriately. Quit handing out monpolies with their dubious value and economically damaging aspects, as well as their negative effects on development. Hand out a check instead. The patent system costs huge amounts and makes the economy less competetive as it is (in everything from higher costs of products to high medical costs); switching it over to a tax/benefits scheme costs nothing to the economy as a whole and merely has the benefit of making someone actually accountable for the true costs of the system.

Re:stalemate

[ciscoguy01]

Congress needs to address the problem with broad software patents once and for all.

Most of these software patents the clueless patent examiner lawyers at USPTO are granting are obvious and stupid.
Things that have *always* been done that way by *lots* of people are now patented property, since the patent examiners hardly have the experience and knowledge to tell the difference between the obvious and something actually unique.

Software patents should be either eliminated completely, or should be strictly limited, like a 1 year term and very easy to bring forward information (prior art) to cancel them.

This is absolutely ridiculous. Verizon basically patented an extension of DNS. Mapping addresses to phone numbers? Puleeze. We did that in a database in 1977.

I should have patented it then. Heh.

Re:stalemate

[virtual_mps]

While Vonage was doing all that work, they should have performed one more task. They should have had someone do a patent check.

Its not totally Verizon's fault. Hahahahaha. Have you actually ever done a patent search? Go ahead, list for us the patents that might affect a voice over IP business. That's why the system is stupid--there are so many patents that are so broadly written that it is easier to reinvent the wheel than to find it in the patent system. It is absolutely certain that any non-trivial product has implemented some patented ideas, but it would cost more than the product is worth to find them all.

Re:stalemate

[Alioth]

Have you ever tried to do one? It's almost entirely impractical, and you'll end up coming to the conclusion that "printf("Hello world\n");" infringes on someone's patent. I've been doing a bit of coding today for an embedded system I'm designing, and although all of the code is run of the mill trivial stuff, I'd not be surprised if I've probably infringed at least four or five patents in the process. Fortunately, I don't live in the US so I don't care.

Part of patent reform should include that if someone can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they independently came up with the idea that they are now being sued over, this should be evidence that the patent was not non-obvious in the first place (or else someone wouldn't have independently thought it up) - and this should automatically invalidate the patent.

The USPTO themselves admit that only 5% of patents are worthy, they even have a term for these 5% - "pioneer patents" - i.e. patents that are truly novel and non-obvious. The other part of patent reform should be that only these "pioneer patents" should be accepted.

Re:stalemate

[chihowa]

Welcome to capitalism my friend

Nope. This whole mess was caused by government intervention. In a capitalist free market system, there would be no artificial monopolies such as are granted by patents. This is Verizon killing off Vonage by decidedly non-capitalistic means.

This is excellent

[ebcdic]

Millions of people will be inconvenienced by patent enforcement.

So what will happen?

[The Great Pretender]

Disclaimer - I am a Vonage customer

My best guess:

1) Vonage up the service cost to a level that Verizon can compete at and pay a licensing fee. Problem Verizon have them over a barrel and could pretty much demand what they want, forcing the operation costs too high - putting them out of business.

2) Verizon buy out Vonage at a reduced cost. There's a bunch of people subscribed to Vonage. Even if the fees go up and a chunk stay, that's an easy market capture strategy. Infrastructure is in place etc. Verizon would then jack up the service cost.

3) A third party buy out Vonage. Same problem, but now 1) and 2) are combined.

4) Vonage get their stay. The court case goes on for a few years. Vonage's only argument is that 'it will put us out of business'. They go out of business anyway due to legal fees.

There's plenty of more senarios, but in all cases the service bill will go up. So I need to read my subscription agreement and get ready to ditch the service when the bills start to go up. I wonder if there's a class action lawsuit here for deceiving the customer about ownership of the technology. I'm thinking along the lines of something like - you sub-lease office space, but then get kicked out as the primary leaseholders were not paying their rent to the landlord, also they did not have permission to sub-lease to you. So now you have no office and have lost other cash etc. Any lawyers care to comment?

Why Patents

[SwiftOne]

Have you ever tried to do one? It's almost entirely impractical, and you'll end up coming to the conclusion that "printf("Hello world\n");" infringes on someone's patent.

(One of) The tragedy here is that the patent system is supposed to reward innovators in exchange for the recording and propagation of their idea. Pre-patent times, inventors (allegedly, I don't know the actual history) would secret away their creations, afraid that it'd be copied. Theoretically, many inventions were lost wit the death of their creator, only to be reinvented by someone else. Publication and recording is part of getting a patent, with one of the goals being that we don't spend ingenuity reinventing the wheel.

If no one is consulting these patent records for how to solve a problem, we're not achieving a lot of the intended goal.