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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.
I know. You're going to say "why didn't you do it" or something similar. But considering we already have email, so called "Visual Voicemail" isn't that big a leap.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
A cursory search for "Klausner Technologies" doesn't easily locate their corporate site, but is certainly a long laundry list of all their legal deeds.
Sigs cause cancer.
Ad-free printer friendly version. Article text:
Klausner Technologies Inc said on Monday the company had filed a US$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 Systems and eBay's Skype as infringing its patent for "visual voicemail." The plaintiff seeks an additional US$300 million from the three.
Klausner said in a statement that it filed the lawsuit in U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Texas. A copy of the filing was not yet available from the court.
The suit alleges asserts that the defendants' Internet-based voicemail products and services violate a Klausner patent. It seeks damages and future royalties estimated at $300 million, according to the press release.
The complaint involves U.S. patent 5,572,576, the same one at issue in a suit Klausner filed in 2006 against voice-over-Internet telephone service provider Vonage Holdings Corp. The two sides agreed to settle that earlier case in October 2007, according a spokesman for Klausner.
Vonage is now a licensee of Klausner's voicemail technology for its Vonage Voicemail Plus service, as is Time Warner Inc's AOL for its AOL Voicemail services, Klausner said.
A company spokeswoman said Apple's pioneering Newton personal digital assistant was covered under a licensing deal between Klausner and Japan's Sharp Corp, the manufacturer of the Newton, tied to Klausner's U.S. patent 4,117,542.
The suit naming Apple as a defendant targets the sleek visual voicemail application offered by Apple in its iPhone.
The company alleged in its statement that Cablevision's Optimum Voicemail, Comcast's Digital Voice Voicemail and eBay's Skype Voicemail violate Klausner's patent by allowing users to selectively retrieve and listen to voice messages via message inbox displays.
An Apple spokeswoman said the company does not comment on pending litigation.
EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said his company has not received the suit and would not comment until its lawyers have seen it.
"We haven't seen it," echoed a Cablevision spokesman, who declined to comment further.
The suit was filed for the plaintiff by the California law firm of Dovel & Luner in Texas. "We have litigated this patent successfully on two prior occasions," Greg Dovel of Dovel & Luner, said in the statement issued by Klausner.
You can read the patents in question here. It's an interesting suit -- I can't tell if Klausner has legitimate patents or not, but just because Vonage and AOL rolled over, it doesn't mean that Apple will (disclaimer: my blog link), especially not at those prices.
That high of damages makes me think they want Apple to settle. But that high of damages also makes me think Apple would rather invalidate their patents than settle.
This, like many patent lawsuits today, is entirely ridiculous. Visual voicemail is essentially identical to an email with an audio attachment and a fancy wrapper around it. If these types of cases keep happening, corporate America is going to eat itself whole. We're going to see more and more people who's business model is to patent trivial things and try to lynch anyone who approaches something similar to it.
Yes, seeing a list of things in a list format is so amazingly original. Just add "voicemail" and, sure it's patentable! I've been using internet-based "visual" voice mail for like 10 years. Octel VM systems come with a web option and have done so for at least 8 years. This patent, filed in 1977, is just being enforced now? Seems a good case for being invalid just based on the fact that they ignored all infringers until now. I skimmed that patent (http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4117542.html) and I'm at a loss to see how it applies. They talk of being able to speak letters a numbers. Specifically, under "Talking Phone Book" it can read your phone number from an address book as well as displaying it. (a) not rocket science, and (b) not what Apple's product even does. Looks more like a patent on an electronic address book.
I don't know, but it works for me.
I'm so tired of reading stories like this. The guy who is suing actually thinks he's not a patent troll. I read an article about this guy where he denies he's a patent troll. Here's an excerpt:
Riiiight, it's Apple's fault he has to sue them. He had an idea, and as far as I can tell, never saw, met, or discussed it with anyone at Apple. They happened to have a similar idea and acted on it, and now they have to pay. Dearly. Some more wisdom from him:
I'm sorry, but I just don't see having an idea as meriting hundreds of millions of dollars. Acting on an idea, now that's worth something.
I have lots of ideas, too. I don't patent most of them, because I don't plan on acting on them, and I don't feel like I deserve hundreds of millions of dollars if someone else does. Even if there were something I feel like would make the world a better place, it's likely I wouldn't pursue it because I know I'd get sued into oblivion for just about anything I might do.
I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how patents spur innovation. Every time I read articles like this, patents are being used to hinder it.
Someone at Apple is going to throw an impeccably designed chair about this.
What about the famous scene in episode 4 with R2D2 "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope..."
Does that count as prior art?
Given Apple's litigious history, it will be fun to see how this shakes out. Hand me the popcorn, please. No matter who loses, we all win.
While I strongly feel that no one should be able to patent putting certain types of sequential data objects into a scrolling list widget (on the grounds that the invention is the widget, not the application of the widget to some kind of data), Apple has sort of hyped their way into a corner here, having touted this amazing feature of the iPhone as cool and innovative, they now cannot consistently claim that it is obvious and trivial.
The wheels of invention have officially come spinning off. Visual voicemail? Does this cover video voicemail? If not, who owns the patent to that... And when do those lawsuits come?
If you own a patent, and have no desire to do anything with it, you're not helping innovation, nor are you protecting anything. You slow progress, and you hurt the people who actually do want to change the world. I'm starting to believe in the idea that the US has about 90 years left. At this rate, we won't be able to develop anything without getting sued. Plus, China will continue to block our products, copy them, and sell them back to us.
I feel a little better now. OK.. for a more reasonable reaction... How about: If you patent something, and you don't have some product to market utilizing that patent in less than 5(? I'm flexible) years, it goes out the window. The patent also expires after 15(3xinitial?) years. By then, you should have improved your product, and you should own the market enough to protect your inventions. If you get swallowed by competition the day after the patent dies, you sucked at running the business. Sure this opens up the possibility of someone coming up with an idea, patenting it, and intentionally not making a product to stop future patenting of the idea.... But is that any worse than what's happening now?
I don't want to say that his invention has enough merit to gain or loose a patent, but it seems many people are crying "patent troll" without knowing the specifics of the case.
this is the patent in question which specifically is an improvement of current voicemail systems which provides visual information. To add to that it was issued over a decade ago and was filed for in 1994. Priority may go back further. The claims specifically show the intended improvement of the voicemail system, and right off the top of my head I don't recall anything that complex regarding voicemail in 1994. Now it's pretty common because we have more than Pentium 133Mhz computers at the bleeding edge to power equipment, but back then something like this (while it maybe somebody did dream it up) was unheard of. I don't like that he did (as far as I can tell) nothing to advance the technology, but I don't think this patent is without some merit.
The original generic sig.
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.
IANAL, however, the AT&T Intuity Audix Message Manager is a desktop product that gives you random access to your voice mail messages. The Message Manager user guide dated January 1995 is on the Avaya site at:
http://support.avaya.com/edoc/docs/intaudix/iammusr1.pdf
Go to page 25 "Listening to your messages" shows how to select any voice mail message displayed on your screen. This wasn't rocket science. I wasn't involved with that products development, but I don't recall any patents being issued for it. Even at the time it seemed like an obvious thing to do and should be to any practitioner in voice mail.
Whoa there, were do you work?
While inventors may be discouraged from doing their own prior art searches, that is only because in the next breath they are being encouraged to pay someone to do it for them. There actually is a valid reason for this, as the inventor likely knows so much about his invention that there is a fair chance that he either interprets everything remotely similar to be infringing, or he sees his device as being so specialized that nothing, in his mind, is similar.
Companies like apple, comcast, and ebay have people on staff whose sole responsibility is to search for prior art.
I might patent it actually
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I got that with the Soundblaster card/CD-ROM kit sold by Borland in the late 80's/early 90's. Still have the machine here and the floppies.
The software showed a list of voice-mails, including time received. I don't know whether the caller ID worked since I used it in Europe. As said, the software lets selectively listen to the voice messages. It also features optionally multiple mailboxes (with a voice prompt to enter the mailbox number) and was shipped standard with the multimedia Soundblaster card and CDROM player sold by Borland.
We are a company that invents and receives patents - my own - and licenses them.
He invents patents, he doesn't patent inventions. Pure patent troll.
I found some early Message Manager documentation in our archives.
The technical prospectus ( which would be very early in the product cycle ) is dated March 25, 1994. The Release 1.0 requirements are dated March 11, 1994.
A development plan is dated April 6th, 1994 ( after the patent filing date ), however the document version number is 0.6. The status date of the document was December 2nd, 1993, which I think is the same as creation date.
One undated document, but added to the database on Jan 12th 1994, says the "competition has announced GUI interface to voice mail products including Northern Telecom, VMX, Active Voice, AVT, Octel and others", and goes into some detail on each one.
It sounds to me like this patent was filed back then as a patent time bomb, that is, let products get built that infringe on the patent and then years later file big dollar lawsuits. Nice business strategy. Hopefully there is enough prior art here to kill this lawsuit.