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Vonage and Verizon — Prepare for Round 2

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the fight-night dept.

According to the New York Times, Vonage is preparing to take it's case back down to the lower courts for a retrial of the lawsuit against them from Verizon. Their hope is that with newer approaches set forth by the supreme court that the lower courts will be able to decide whether Verizon's patent(s) are ordinary/obvious or deserve patent protection. I wonder if this time it will be more obvious to the courts that Verizon's patents aren't so original?

2 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Specifics by DoctaStooge · · Score: 3, Informative

    There are 3 patents in all. 2 of these cover the switching between IP telephony and PSTN telephony. These patents use the ideas of ip->ip calls, pstn->pstn calls, and basically what is a DNS setup in between to facilitate the switching of packets between these two types of telephony networks. Verizon claims the "dns" part as the actual invention, although the patents just contain an idea, and no actual description of how it is implemented. This switching problem was worked on by SIP and H.323 in efforts to develop open standards in conjunction with Microsoft, Cisco, and other companies, and from what I understand, even earlier by 3Com.

  2. ENUM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Folks,

    There is a public standard called ENUM that is defined by an IETF RFC and that basically involves the mapping of a Telephone Number (TN) to IP address, which is at the core of the Verizon patent.

    ENUM in its public and carrier implementations is basically DNS for VoIP. It resolves TN to IP address, email, IM ID, or other strings that can be used to reach the user. Most if not all ENUM Addressing Servers are built on top of DNS server capabilities.

    It's an obvious use of an existing technology. By the same token, if ENUM infringes on the Verizon patent, then the whole Internet DNS system could infringe on the Verizon patent because DNS can be READILY used to return an IP for any TN as long as the TN is specified as a domain name, using the reversed TN-domain format, e.g. 2.1.2.1.5.5.5.2.1.2.1.e164.arpa (for public ENUM.) DNS and ENUM are one and the same. ENUM is simply one "use case" for DNS.

    !!!

    The courts need opinions like these to defeat Verizon.

    Not defeating Verizon means that DNS itself will be infringing on their patent.

    Does it mean that they can shutdown the Internet?