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British Telecom Claims Patents on VOIP Session Initiation Protocol
An anonymous reader writes with bad news for operators of SIP gateways. From the article: "VoIP-to-PSTN termination providers and SIP vendors will be watching their inboxes for a lawyer's letter from BT, which has kicked off a licensing program levying a fee on the industry, based on a list of 99 patents .. The British incumbent is offering to allow third parties to use the Session Initiation Protocol under a license agreement... BT is requesting either $US50,000 or a combination of 0.3 percent of future revenue from affected products, plus 0.3 percent of the last six months' sales for products as 'past damages.' It's kindly offering a discount for customers that pay up within six weeks of receiving a BT letter of demand, and there's a premium to $US60,000 and 0.36 percent of revenue for those who hold out."
Geth them!
BT is just another failed Tory privatisation, retarding and overcharging for UK telecoms ever since. Its only redeeming feature is that it is set up by regulatory-captured Ofcom to be the less awful alternative to Murdoch and Branson's brands.
Ah, the true nature of competition where there is natural monopoly.
If you fail to vigorously defend your patent equally and uniformly against all known cases of infringement from the day you file, you lose the patent. Period.
All ITSPs then should ditch SIP for PSTN trunking and move to support IAX2. A much simpler protocol and it goes through NAT like a knife through butter.
The "Patent Extortion Letter Protocol"?
Protocols are APIs.
http://www.zdnet.com/oracle-vs-google-one-claim-that-should-not-stand-3040155046/
There needs to be some sort of "horse has left the barn" exemption to patent enforceability. If a patent holder sits quietly and watches while an industry develops around something they believe to be infringing, it's not reasonable to allow them to wait until billions of dollars are at stake and then suddenly show up with a demand for payment.
That's not at all in the spirit of patent law. The purpose was to allow the patent holder the ability to exploit their own invention, not to allow them to sit on their asses doing nothing and then exploit everyone else's work.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
...99 patents, but SIP ain't one.
All this bickering about session initialization is a non-starter. C'mon, I had to retrieve my password for this terrible joke.
Reminds me of the hidden page patent.
I'm sure this will go the same way.
http://www.zdnet.com/bt-loses-hyperlink-patent-case-3002121257/
One must wonder if BT is willing to force the ISPs that already have a SIP trunk with them, to sign this deal. Or maybe that's where they're aiming at.. Either way good luck with this stupidness
I work for a VoIP provider, based in a UK and have several direct SIP links to BT - so they know we use it! The irony is they can't charge us these license fees because currently the law in the UK prevents them.
Too bad the Brits already screwed over their potential source of Fremen allies.
A "protocol" is simply a language construct. Anyone with proper IT training would not allow SIP to be patented in the first place as it is simply an agreement to arrange bits in predefined fields and communicate with networked peers in a consistant manner. This can only be the work of lawyers.
How does one legally codify "spirit"?
You didn't invent SIP. And you don't own a claim on it either. You are completely full of shit.
Nothing more than a greedy money grab at a NON unique idea in the first place.
In fact... Enough of this shit. Execute him. For being a douche and wasting everyones time. We all have things to do.
Sir,
We select the 0.3 percent of revenue payment option. We have enclosed a check for $0.00 to cover all past and future expected revenue.
Signed, The FreeTards
Have gnu, will travel.
Protecting the innovators* since 1624.
*) Read: "Screwing the innovators for profit"
I don't see BT's name associated with RFC 3261. When you work in an IETF Internet Standards Track working group, you're meant to declare any patent encumbrances that you may possess over the subject matter. That allows potential users to avoid it like the plague.
The last mile to the house is a natural monopoly. Once you get to some sort of switching station then you could have real competition with physical hardware from different competing ISPs colocated in the same offices and using separate upstream bandwidth. That's more than just "competing bill-printing services".
I have no idea if this is what they do in the UK, but it's *possible*.
The ground all belongs to everyone, since nobody owned it thousands of years ago, and so nobody owns it, or everybody does. As a result BT owes me rent.
... and develop an all new protocol. At this point, it won't even need PSTN capability since we are moving away from that.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If you dominate a mature industry (including have a monopoly), and you see disruption on the horizon, this shows one of your few defenses.
Ordinarily, disruption works because the newcomers use business models that you can't replicate, largely because you have specialized so
effectively. What you can do, however, is bring your considerable resources to bear in developing or collecting patents. Then you can use
those patents against the new competitors, even if you can never, or intend to never, use them yourself. Verizon may have done this against Vonage.
Note that these are all US patent applications: software is not usually patentable in the United Kingdom.
This is your problem, US. Do the sensible thing: abolish software patents.
Interesting, they did not (it appears) disclose interests to RFC3261, and should reasonably have known to do so. There is a potential argument there, maybe (leaving aside whether any of the patents are valid or whether any of the claims actually read on SIP, which is another question entirely).
The IETF MMUSIC (Multiparty Multimedia Session Control) Working Group started working on Session Protocols in 1993.
Initial Internet drafts for a Session Invitation Protocol and a Simple Conference Invitation Protocol were prepared in 1996, and merged to a single first draft of SIP by December 1996 (slide 10), with further drafts (2-12) leading up to the publication of RFC 2543 in March of 1999 (slides 11-13, ibid.).
I don't see anything that says BT had a hand in anything to do with SIP up to 1996. More than half the patents BT claims (Exhibit C) were filed after RFC 2543 was published.
I hope this information is a useful starting point for some SIP vendor.
BT (British Telecom) is a monumentally corrupt British company that filters back vast amounts of money into the pockets of British politicians. It was, and effectively still is, the POTS monopoly in the UK (curiously excluding one small region of Britain for historic reasons. While BT was a legal monopoly, Britain had some of the highest phone charges, and least choice in end-user equipment options, in the First World. Swimming in cash like all Britain's utility monopolies, BT would invest in laughably bad R+D projects, given the world atrocities like Prestel, a service so bad it made the original AOL like like the current Internet.
Prestel is significant because, of course, it became the basis of BT claiming it owned 'hyperlinks', and that everything on the Internet owed them royalties. A billion pieces of prior art sank that claim in a hurricane of hilarity. In Britain, the BBC would always tell the sheeple that EVERYTHING had been invented in Britain, and that the British version was, of course, the best. You will still get dummies here defending the work of BT, for instance. Monopolies do APPEAR to have dabbled in a lot of key technology areas, but this is entirely a consequence of obscenely large pools of cash being available with no accountability. Of course some of this money sloshes into 'pet projects' of managers with an interest in technology.
Interestingly, the putrid Prestel died not because it was so crap (which it most certainly was), but because unlike Mintel, the French equivalent, Prestel was a 'walled garden' where almost every form of potential content was deemed 'controversial', and thus banned. The irony is that years later, after privatisation, BT would make new fortunes from the criminal gangs who ran the so-called 'sex-lines'.
Britain largely has the dense urban populations that would easily benefit from the same digital cable technology one sees rolled out in Singapore and South Korea. Brits have an unending appetite for technology. Sadly, the hyper-corrupt BT, and a bunch of even worse TV cable companies, control the cabled communications infrastructure in the UK. The cable infrastructure is only ungraded when the UK government decides to roll out more sophisticated citizen surveillance projects- the cameras and under-road tire RFID trackers that make Britain more '1984' than Orwell would ever dared to have imagined.
BT has a portfolio of patents that you might understand by considering the same from IBM. BT had a finger in an incredible number of pies, none of which it 'cooked', but all of which it corruptly claims inventors rights over. Lots of things do get invented in Britain, but vanishingly few of these came from BT. BT's claims always have the form "we implemented an idea already in existence but not widely used, so we now own that idea".
Being able to patent a communications protocol is actually worse than being able to patent a specific implementation of that protocol.
This whole thing is messed up. I work in voice for a major MSO, and we had to go through a bunch of fact finding and discovery for the BT lawsuit. The thing that is really annoying is that SIP, to my knowledge, is not the result of BT's work. It's the result of the IETF RFC process. That'd be like me jumping up and saying I have the patent on TCP/IP.
Wasn't it BT who a little over a decade ago decided it held the patent on hyperlinks and started threatening to patent troll the whole Internet?
WTF: SIP is an IETF standard, so these people should not be holding any patents, otherwise it is another useless standard. It would be like if http protocol was patented and they required you to pay to implement it.
Only 'flamers' flame!
...all start paying royalties to Dr Evil when we use the question mark, That would make everybody happy.
I say yay because i really dont like sip, i think its a horrible protocol and anything that would end its life is fantastic (even if it is a patent troll). Though its hard to see if BT are claiming ownership of any tech that does voip to pstn or just SIP.
With any luck, someone will develop a useful protocol to replace it, though my hopes arent high.
Companies that are involved in the development of standards, or are even on the mailing list of the standards body, are obligated to disclose patents that they may have that would impact the standard. If they fail to disclose such patents before the standard is published then they risk losing the right to claim license fees.
In this case, BT must have been aware of SIP as it started its development and appear not to have disclosed any related IPR to the IETF. The US State Department should investigate this matter to see if BT should be allowed to assert US patents against US companies - previous cases in which patent holders have failed to disclose did lead to their right to claim royalties being revoked.
We should also ask whether the patents claim any aspect of SIP that was not already performed by H.323 or other signaling protocols that existed prior to 1990.
I have ben working with VoIP since Henning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henning_Schulzrinne) was wearing his underpants... I was in Hotsip And then Cisco and then Avaya and then Italtel developing much code that actually runs SIP trunking in lots of softswitches and shit like that and I can only wholeheartedly totally, utterly completely agree with you...
SIP is the WRONG WAY TO IMPLEMENT IAX2 !!! IT HAS TO BE EVIL AND A DEATH STAR EVIL GIFT FROM THE DEVIL TO MANKIND SO IT CAN SELF DESTRUCT WITH LOTS OF SIP error 408.......
WHEW !!! sorry, I just has to get this off my hairy three breasted chest....