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Vonage and Verizon — Prepare for Round 2
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?
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.