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Prior Art On Verizon Patents

Posted by kdawson on from the taking-down-an-industry-on-a-sham dept.

greenbird sends in word that Techdirt has up information from Daniel Berninger documenting prior art in the Verizon patents being used to destroy Vonage. "...due to the fun way the patent system works, introducing that kind of prior art to the USPTO for it to review the validity of Verizon's VoIP patents will take quite a bit of time and effort — much longer than Vonage has to fight Verizon in court." From Berninger's note: "In particular, the claims in both patents were anticipated by open standards assembled by the VoIP Forum (H.323) in 1996 and published in January 1997 with the participation of members from Cisco Systems, Microsoft, IBM, Nortel, Intel, Motorola, Lucent, and VocalTec Communications, among others... The Eric Voit patent applications reflect, in particular, contributions made by VocalTec Communication to the VoIP Forum during 1996 and formally published at the same time as a separate document."

7 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Re:i use vonage by Butisol · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'm torn on this. On the one hand they provide a valuable service to millions of subscribers. On the other hand they made that AWFUL AWFUL FUCKING UNHOLY AWFUL woohoo commercial. I wish they could stay in business, but maybe have all of their senior execs and marketing department executed by skinning them and drowning them in saline solution.

  2. Re:Fun way? by schon · · Score: 5, Funny

    Clearly, prior art is not one of them - even if "the concepts in those patents were clearly discussed and published by others prior to the patent being filed" Come on, while VoIP concepts may have been discussed, it's quite clear that nobody would have thought of implementing them on the internet.
  3. Re:It's more basic then this by dgatwood · · Score: 2, Funny

    Wow. So Verizon invented the mapping table. Whod'-a-thunk it?

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  4. Re:The excuse... by Nullav · · Score: 5, Funny

    They claimed they work on a quota system and all they had to do was a few quick Google searches and then grant the patent.
    Well I know where I want to work now.
    --
    I just read Slashdot for the articles.
  5. Re:The excuse... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    The USTPO is *you*.


    The USTPO was the Man of the Year. He's been very busy lately, give him a break.
  6. Re:The excuse... by edittard · · Score: 0, Funny

    As long as they met their quota they seemed to be able to be bums the rest of the week...
    I always wondered what eldavojohn & Roland Piquepaille did for a day-job.
    --
    At the bottom of the /. main page it says 'Yesterday's News'. Well they got that right.
  7. Re:The excuse... by MrNiceguy_KS · · Score: 2, Funny
    If you don't think that this is a dream job, just think of being able to use this excuse:

    "This website is work related! I'm checking for prior art on this patent for delivery of pornographic media."

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    Redundancy is good And also good.