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."

Comments

Patentese

[sakdoctor]

I love how prefixing anything with "Method and apparatus for implementing..." makes the obvious sound non-obvious, at least to an (un)reasonable person.

Wait, what?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

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.

Re:Wait, what?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I just read what I wrote -- and I realize that now I understand. This is a diabolical CmdrTaco ploy to get us to RTFA -- you sneaky, sneaky devil you.

Stop the madness

[PPH]

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.

Re:Stop the madness

[Tablizer]

// how to make ordinary processes into patents
  h = openFile("ordinary_behavior.txt");
  while (w = readNextWord(h)) {
    if (random(0.0,1.0) > 0.96) {
      w = w + " using a computer ";
    }
    print(w);
  }

Re:Stop the madness

[56]

This is not meant as a flame - I'm just unclear about what you're saying.

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?

As I understand it, this line of reasoning could be used to argue that, since the alphabet is public domain, all other uses of that alphabet should also be public domain. If that's what you mean, then I disagree.

Am I misunderstanding your argument?

Re:Stop the madness

[sjames]

More along the lines that if we already have a patent free technology to move data over a network and another to turn voice into data, then combining the two is far from non-obvious. Arguably, combining the two is exactly what they were intended for from the beginning. It's especially true for VoIP where in the '70s voice packets were being carried by frame relay.

Sort-of car analogy. Mail is delivered using gasoline powered vehicles. Doing exactly the same thing using a propane powered vehicle is certainly not patent worthy. If vehicles in general are being converted to propane, even less so.

So, the typewriter was an invention. Using the typewriter for personal (rather than business) correspondence was not.

Re:Stop the madness

[56]

Ahh ok so it's an issue of it being a linear development of an existing invention, rather than a new invention in and of itself. That makes sense!

I was thinking that he was saying that, because the parent invention is public domain, all subsequent inventions based on it must therefore also be public domain - which sounded ridiculous.

I'm not sure if I agree with him about VOIP, but I can see the logic of the argument.

Thanks!

Re:Stop the madness

[deblau]

The Supreme Court fairly well nixed "Internet patents" with its (unanimous) decision in KSR. Specifically:

The subject matter of the patent before the Court [in one case] was a device combining two pre-existing elements: a radiant-heat burner and a paving machine. The device, the Court concluded, did not create some new synergy: The radiant-heat burner functioned just as a burner was expected to function; and the paving machine did the same. The two in combination did no more than they would in separate, sequential operation. In those circumstances, "while the combination of old elements performed a useful function, it added nothing to the nature and quality of the radiant-heat burner already patented," and the patent failed...

Finally, in [a later case], the Court derived from the precedents the conclusion that when a patent "simply arranges old elements with each performing the same function it had been known to perform" and yields no more than one would expect from such an arrangement, the combination is obvious.

If the combination of some technology with the Internet yields more than the sum of the parts, or if new tech solves a known, fundamental problem with the Internet, then perhaps you have non-obvious subject matter. But that's not true in the vast majority of software and/or Internet patent applications these days.

I'll second that

[gstovall]

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.