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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?
Forgive me as it's been a while since I looked at the patent documents. But I do recall posters here on slashdot found prior art that could (possibly) be used to deem the patents invalid. Why try to invalidate a patent on obviousness when you can just use prior art? Seems like that would be the easier option.
Vonage addressing the courts about the obviousness of the patents:
Verizon: We object!
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I'm a happy Vonage subscriber and was thrilled when the USSC essentially gutted patent law as it exists.
Not only do I think Vonage will prevail in this case, I also think they should pursue a case against Verizon for anti-trust.
And in other news, Verizon RI lost $9.7 million last year. I had long thought they'd lost at a maximum a third their business but it gets better, 43% of land lines in RI aren't Verizon land lines any longer. So what does Verizon do to counter the loss? They hike rates.
A good anti-trust action would be the kick needed to fracture Verizon into a million little pieces. Then the new at&t had better watch out.
Lets face it, VoIP was and is known as a disruptive technology. Brilliant little idea, use the IP capability built into most telephone switches to take advantage of excess switching capacity. And in the end, disruptive technologies almost ALWAYS win.
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.
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?
Aren't they basically the same thing? If it's obvious, there will probably be prior art, just because of its obviousness.
No, they're not.
"Prior art" means it's already been done that way, or exactly that way of doing it has been described publicly.
"Obvious" means that if a person "skilled in the art" sets out to actually do it, he's likely to come up with that way of doing it as one of his design options. It does NOT mean:
- It's already been done that way.
- That way of doing it has already been described.
There are a number of reasons an "obvious" invention would not be prior art. One of the biggest is that the technology might not have gotten to the point were it's practical to practice such an invention. Another is that the business environment may not yet make use of the invention a good business plan. Once these externalities are resolved and people are set to do the task, the "obvious" inventions are then detail-designed and implemented. Sometimes, once it becomes clear that they WILL be resolved, people begin planning and publishing.
Both of these apply here.
Once these externalities are resolved and people are set to do the task, the "obvious" inventions are then detail-designed and implemented. Sometimes, once it becomes clear that they WILL be resolved, people begin planning and publishing - for instance: in academia, or in standards organizations.
Both of these have happened here.
But if "obvious" is abandoned and "prior art" required, it becomes possible for an alert businessman to lock up the obvious ways of doing things by rushing to the patent office with a flurry of applications for every obvious solution that nobody has happened to have published on or done - often because it's so obvious they thought there was no point in mentioning it.
Think about it: What's "the internet way to build a phone company"?
- Use a stock streaming VoIP protocol to carry calls on the internet.
- Use VOIP/POTS bridge servers at price-convenient locations when you need to contact to a POTS phone (or connect two POTS phones to each other over your IP service).
- Use a database (such as DNS) to translate user identification information to routing information - which includes:
a) Phone number and preferred VoIP/POTS bridge address(es) when the called phone is on the POTS side.
b) Multiple possible sites and the preferred order for trying them (call forwarding)
c) A registration entry made by a portable wireless phone when it associated access point as it moved into range.
- Also use databases to authorize calls and record billing information when calls are made.
Obvious, right? If somebody set you to do this that's what YOU'D do, right?
Well a), b), and c) are what Verizon claimed are their non-obvious inventions - and got the patent office and a lower court to agree and almost KILL Vonage by blocking them from doing anything like it.
(I think they also claimed tying authorization and billing for VoIP or VoIP/POTS bridged calls into database authorization/billing systems, too.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ok, so this is going back to the lower courts and the SC managed to side-step the deeper aspects of this case...
Seems to me they hit the nail squarely on the head.
so it would be interesting to hear from the legal experts as to what broader ramifications we could expect to see from a Vonage win in a re-trial...
IANAL but it seems to me that SCOTUS just pulled the rug out from under all the bogus "do this well-understood thing but ON THE INTERNET" patents.
Verizon vs. Vonage might be the snowball that starts the avalanche.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
FIGHT!
(cue Mortal Kombat theme)
JPEG, WMV, and most other codecs mostly do minor adaptations to compression techniques that have been around since the 1960s, and as such, should have very few valid patents (despite the huge number of patents that have been granted in these areas).
Codecs are also a good example of when interoperability should trump patentability. IMHO, data formats and the means needed to convert data formats to a standard format should not be protected under any body of intellectual property law (including patents), as this leads inevitably to vendor lock-in. In other words, decompressing technology should be legal to implement under all circumstances without any license.
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