Vonage Goes To Court III - The AT&T Suit

kickabear writes "AT&T has filed a lawsuit against Vonage, claiming patent infringement. This is the third major lawsuit to have been brought against Vonage by a major phone company. Vonage lost the previous two lawsuits, brought by Sprint-Nextel and Verizon. How much more money can Vonage afford to give away? How can Vonage educate a jury on prior art? 'It said in a filing to the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission that AT&T is seeking injunctive relief, compensatory and treble damages and attorneys' fees in unspecified amounts. Vonage said the lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Wisconsin on October 17.'"

Comments

can't beat em, sue em!

[timmarhy]

and people think RIAA are evil cocksuckers, teleco company's leave them for dead.

Re:can't beat em, sue em!

[Z00L00K]

In the end it seems likely that the alleged patent violations are harming the economy and development in a country in decline. The whole system seems corrupt and there are fights over the remains.

The US dollar has fallen to almost half it's value compared to the Swedish Krona in a few years. It's falling compared to other economies too.

To cut the losses, both economical and trust-wise it's time for a complete rebuild of the legal system regarding property rights and estimation of value loss. Suing people for ridiculous amounts of money won't help either. Software patents should be declared invalid - retroactively so that all court rulings regarding software patent breaks can be invalidated.

And the practice of being able to pick patent fees from the users of a technology that has a certain patent is completely hopeless. If anybody should be held responsible it's the manufacturer - not the user. If the manufacturer is in a foreign country - use the customs office to take care of the problem for all future cases.

Especially software patents are bad - because they often are applied to a certain detail, and the patents should have been dismissed as obvious. The effort to write code may be great for one programmer but made on the fly by another without even realizing that the first programmer has gotten a patent for the solution. Who is to blame? Who is responsible? Is it really "protection of assets" going on or is it just a spanner in the works of development and ultimately decreases the ability of the country to compete on the international market?

What most rulings in cases regarding software patents fails to take into account is that software is a volatile international thing - almost like the air we breathe or the water we drink - and it has no boundaries. (unless you build a really great firewall or resort to computers only able to run a nationally assigned OS and programming language). Each case where a patent software is granted is another nail in the coffin for development.

The use of patents forces you to look back all the time to make sure nobody infringes on your patent or tries to make it invalid. The current economic lifespan of a patent should be reduced to 3 to 4 years after which it only causes harm. If less effort is put into patents and more into development you will see a lot of more development done.

Simple solution

[bogaboga]

And here is the code: -

If (court_fines > available_cash) then

# increase fees paid by customers

(monthly_subscription_fee = monthly_subscription_fee * 1.25)

end

Some code would of course be responsible to check whether customers are beginning to jump ship after say a month.

Guys, they will survive this one.

As a Vonage Customer...

[Belial6]

As a Vonage Customer, I will continue to use their superior service, even if the price does have to increase.

Patents are Evil

[pnewhook]

Stories like this are really starting to annoy me. So may times we hear that a company that is just doing good businees gets sued into obivion for no real good reason.

As I'm going through patent hell myself right now, I've come to the conclusion that patents solely exist to stifle and restrict innovation. They no longer protect the inventor in any way. The only people getting rich off of patents are the lawyers.

Patents have outlived their usefullness and the entire system should be scrapped.

Re:Patents are Evil

[dgatwood]

Patents have outlived their usefullness and the entire system should be scrapped.

Welcome to ten years ago.

Re:Patents are Evil

[cybereal]

In the narrow view of this scenario you seem to have a point. But in the grand view of all invention you have completely lost your footing. If a simple swap of patent ownership was made, you'd be happy to see Vonage protected by these old patents that they supposedly infringe.

The real problem is the requirement to maintain a patent. Companies seem to require no active use and no context definition for a given patent. I think reform would solve the problem, if it could include certain division of patenting, such as, into particular markets for requiring patent claims to specify rather detailed scenarios of use. Then in 10 years, if some new company comes along and uses the same technology for entirely different purposes, or in a different market, then the patent wouldn't apply to them.

Furthermore, if a company is awarded in any way shape or form a kind of monopoly (such as cable companies or telephone companies awarded "natural" monopolies due to the practical realities of running cables and pipes) then they should forfeit any and all patent rights until said monopoly is relinquished. Perhaps there could be some context rules for that as well. Say, if AT&T has any natural monopolies to provided internet access then any patents used for the purpose of doing business over the internet should be forfeit in return for the huge gift of that monopoly.

These or other ideas come and go. It's too bad nobody really cares besides the minorities that actually understand and see the impact. The masses, the ones who actually vote, never hear of this and thusly, don't care. Because the voters don't care, the politicians don't bother to address it for their resumé a.k.a. platform, because it's simply bad marketing. Even if it was a great and intelligent move, too many potential voters would see it as not in their interests and not vote. This is why politicians do such strange things. They are motivated to keep their jobs. Wouldn't you be?

skunks

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn telcos took public infrastructure bought and paid for and built up over years and did diddly squat with it other than running it as a cash cow, and now for some magical reason they get to own all those pipes. Why is this?? Those pipes rightfully should be public infrastructure like the roads. I *clearly* remember before the big breakup having the rented hard wired phone, and lining up as a kid to talk to grandma with all the siblings for 30 seconds apiece because it cost so much for long distance. Comes along some companies like vonage who prove it can be done much cheaper and more efficiently, and they get sued.

We need the People's ubiquitous wireless mesh network, something we can use for voice and data and just "route around" the current information bottlenecks, which are the big telcos with the entrenched monopoly mindset and WAY too much power in the legislative process. Now watch these assholes gobble up more of the so called publics airwaves in the next spectrum auction, so they can lock in more control and profits. Screw it, they should be disallowed from even bidding, it should just be mandated it is for the creation of the universal wireless network, something needing not much at all in the way of plutocratic middlemen companies and their precious stolen infrastructure.

They're back against the wall

[mind21_98]

Yep, the telcos are trying to kill them. They're just going to keep finding stuff till Vonage dies. Then the telcos can increase their prices since they end up being the only game in town. Simple as that.

lol

[spykemail]

If you can't compete with a superior business model your best bet is to sue it.

Re:Patent #

[BrianWCarver]

6,487,200 The full Complaint (pdf)

Blood in the water

[sweatyboatman]

The things Verizon and Sprint have patents on, AT&T has patents on. All big telcos have thousands of patents covering every aspect of the telephone industry. And now with the loss in the Verizon case and a settlement in the Sprint case, it's clear that Vonage is incapable of defending their business model. It's time (and perhaps past time) for anyone with a patent claim to get in on the game.

Vonage is no longer a viable company. They are just a lump of cash, hemorrhaging out to anyone who looks at them crossly. Right now the game is for the tens/hundreds of millions of dollars Vonage has in cash. But that's just the appetizer; the real prize is the millions of Vonage customers who can be converted over to a "Triple Play" package.

Re:Blood in the water

[Dun Malg]

So here is the part I don't understand... If they all have patents... why doesn't Verizon sue Sprint and Sprint sue ATT and ATT sue NTTDocomo and.... It begins as a sort of "mexican standoff", where the big guys each hold a big chunk of critical patent space and no one company is in any position to assert their patent position in court for fear the others will counter-sue. They then cross-license with one another, leaving the small group of large established companies free to pursue all things telephone. Any newcomers to the market face the impossible task of finding a way through this patent minefield that the big companies are free to ignore.

I'm cheering for Google for my first time

[CrazyJim1]

I didn't realize until now how much AT&T and Verizon are in bed. Google saw this when the 700mhz spectrum went up for auction. The government is supposed to regulate monopolies, but monopolies seem to be doing the regulation of the government.

Collusion?

[the_greywolf]

Can't Vonage sue Verizon, Sprint and AT&T for collusion and conspiracy under the RICO act or some other suitable anti-competition law?

Surely there's proof!

Not really anything new

[Secrity]

These sorts of patent lawsuits are nothing new. Henry Ford was just about sued into oblivion because of the Seldon patent and Western Union tried to sue Alex Bell into oblivion (retro-irony). RCA owned patents on radio and totally controlled production of radios in the US. RCA and AT&T both have a long tradition of filing lawsuits to drive out competition. AT&T and RCA were part of a very small group of companies that cross licensed their vacuum tube patents and drove startups out of business.

Re:Patent #

[PhotoGuy]

The patent (upon a very brief read by unprofessional eyes) seems to broadly be about packet-based voice over IP (well, isn't that all Voice of IP?)

So AT&T completely owns VOIP? That seems pretty damn broad to me, or am I missing that the patent is somehow more narrow than that?