Prior Art On Verizon Patents

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."

Comments

Re:Fun way?

[schon]

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.

Re:The excuse...

[Nullav]

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.