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$360M Patent Suit Over iPhone Voicemail
Stony Stevenson writes "Klausner Technologies said on Monday the company had filed a $360 million suit against Apple and AT&T over voicemail patents that Klausner claims the Apple iPhone infringes. New York-based Klausner said the lawsuit also names Comcast, Cablevision, and eBay's Skype as infringing its patent for 'visual voicemail.' The plaintiff seeks an additional $300 million from the three." Klausner has won on two previous occasions with this patent. The new suit was filed in the Eastern District of Texas, of course.
They reached a settlement with Vonage, if I remember correctly. That's not the same as getting a judgment in your favor that states the patent is valid.
*sigh* back to work...
This -- along with other posters' comments, to be fair -- goes to a common misconception about patents.
They aren't patenting the idea of doing X. The idea of doing X doesn't have to be new or non-obvious. They're patenting a method of doing X, or a device that does X, etc.
Yes, science fiction and spy movies have depicted technologies well in advance of anything "real" that would let you do what your favorite action hero can do. But when they wrote the movie -- get this -- they faked it. They didn't have a method or a device to do it, they just made it look like someone was doing it.
So years later someone comes up with a method or device. Sure, it's obvious that someone would want to do X -- they've been drooling over it in the movies forever, man -- but the question is, was the method or device obvious?
Also note that if someone else comes up with a different method of doing X, that would fall outside the scope of the first patent. This goes to inventors' efforts to make their patent as broad as possible (while still keeping them valid), but the point is, the capability the invention makes possible isn't what's covered by the patent.
LOL PATENTS RULE LOL
Yeah. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. IP laws are like swords that modern tech companies (Apple included) use to beat the rest of us into submission while they corner a market and reap mostly undeserved and exhorbitant profits. MSDOS was not worth billions of dollars, sorry. Whosoever uses the sword shall perish by the sword. In the end, IP laws will lead to violent wars, if they haven't already.
I skimmed over both patents, and they both relate to touch tone dialing and landline operation. I'm not sure how to re-apply that to "wireless" phones that work on digital systems.... The claims themselves are so broad that you would not be able to retrieve any information about your call without stepping on either patent. That would seem to make telephone testing equipment that pre-dates both of these patents by decades enough prior art to invalidate large portions of the patents, so much so, that there's not much left for the actual "patent".
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I worked for a distributor of VMX voicemail systems in the early 90's (they were later acquired by Octel). They had a working "visual voicemail" application at the time. You could open up a window on your PC, see a list of all the messages in your voicemail box, including (if the Caller ID was available) the number, the time and date the message was left, message length, whether the caller had flagged it urgent, and for older messages, whether you had returned it (available only on networked systems). If you had opted for our fax-mail system, the system would also show all your incoming fax messages.
So when does this Klausner dude claim to have patented this? TFA didn't say.
What was once true, is no longer so