Slashdot Mirror
USPTO To Review Controversial VoIP Patent
alphadogg writes "The US Patent and Trademark Office has agreed to review a controversial patent issued in 2001 that is claimed to cover much of the technology underlying VoIP. The patent, held by a small company called C2 Communications Technologies, is one of 10 that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been trying to strike down for several years through its Patent Busting Project. On Friday, the patent office granted the EFF's request for a re-examination. The digital civil-liberties organization argued that another applicant had submitted basically some of the same technology to the patent office before C2 did. Patent No. 6,243,373, 'Method and apparatus for implementing a computer network/Internet telephone system,' is credited to David L. Turock as inventor and is owned by C2, previously called Acceris Communications Technologies."
I love how prefixing anything with "Method and apparatus for implementing..." makes the obvious sound non-obvious, at least to an (un)reasonable person.
The way this summary reads, EFF is fighting to bust a patent because another patent owned by C2 already covers a subset of the technology. Then it turns out that the poor phrasing was from the article itself - which further clarifies that the original patent is owned by Lucent and filed in 1994. I guess the advantage to getting the C2 patent tossed is that the Lucent patent will be expiring several years sooner... still, having that clarification in the summary might have helped.
When TCP/IP (and other protocols) were "invented" back in the 1970s under ARPA contract, they were envisioned as generic methods for routing digital data over a series of networks. Following that, its been a mad dash to submit patents to do X over TCP/IP (or UDP). Where X is prior art and has been for 20, 30 or 40 years*.
TCP/IP and its relatives might have been patentable back when Kahn, Cerf and others developed them. But thanks to ARPA, they are in the public domain. Since the general case is addressed, moving generic digital data, is in the public domain, then why are specific subsets of this technology patentable?
*Voice over packet switched networks is old news. A company I worked for over 30 years ago had just such a PBX phone system. They routed phone calls along with other data over their own microwave system, leased telco lines and various other media in what looked very much like an Intranet. It just wasn't described by RFCs.
Have gnu, will travel.
The FA is poorly written. There might be a Lucent patent c.1994, but even that is isn't enforceable. There's prior art all over the place. Google for the Wired article about Netheads vs. Bellheads (1996). Do you think VoIP was invented two years before that article?
I just invented Voice Over IPV6. You heard it here first.
I've only just started documenting this on swpat.org. It's a publicly editable wiki, help very welcome :
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Absolutely agree with your suggestion.
The company I worked for, in the early 1990s, used Nortel Passport routers between our corporate sites. Both data and voice serving 100,000 employees passed over the connections between the routers. And we didn't have to do anything so primitive as dialing an access number to get to this intranet based system; it was tied into our PBXes, so that numbers for employees at any of our scores of locations would be routed through our intranet, and external numbers would be routed to the PSTN.
By 1994, we were already building and using applications where a click on a link on a web page would automatically connect you to an agent at a customer call center, whether by a phone call or a VoIP connection to your PC.
not now, anyway.
Voice has been encoded and transmitted as data ever since the PSTN went digital. The G.711 voice encoding standard was released in 1972, so the concept of data encoding voice has been commonly known for many decades. The conversion of data into voice/text/braille is not patentable...that's been done for decades.
Perhaps you are simply using voice encoding as an example of processes that MIGHT be patentable, if they are not already known to one skilled in the art. But voice encoding itself is no longer patentable.
Since ONLY data can be transmitted across the internet, and you had already said that transmitting data across the internet is not patentable, then transmitting a stab in the face, or gravity, across the internet could not be patentable, since it would HAVE to be converted to data to be transmitted across the internet.
Book are not patentable. The idea of a book came into common usage centuries ago. However, the content of books can be copyrighted. Is this perhaps what you mean? It's the ordering of the symbols in the book, and the structure of any associated graphics, that are copyrighted.
Interesting change of mind there..