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Apple Now Relaying All FaceTime Calls Due To Lost Patent Dispute
Em Adespoton writes "Before the VirnetX case, nearly all FaceTime calls were done through a system of direct communication. Essentially, Apple would verify that both parties had valid FaceTime accounts and then allow their two devices to speak directly to each other over the Internet, without any intermediary or 'relay' servers. However, a small number of calls—5 to 10 percent, according to an Apple engineer who testified at trial—were routed through 'relay servers.' At the August 15 hearing, a VirnetX lawyer stated that Apple had logged 'over half a million calls' complaining about the quality of FaceTime [since disabling direct connections]."
Nothing to do with ability to intercept.
Well, I noted that some "patent expert" didn't report this at all, despite being one who is self proclaimed as following and reporting on patent issues. I am sure if this involved Google/Motorola or Android, this "expert" would have lots to report on the issue. I will abbreviate his name as FM. Is there a trend?
Not all countries suffer from software patents. Does Apple have to relay people connecting within those, too?
What is the patent involved here? Establishing a connection between two entities on an IP network? NAT traversal techniques? Usage of Interactive Connectivity Establishment protocols?
How is this different from canreinvite=yes/no in Asterisk? Doesn't SIP allow for the same thing?
Hardly. As far as I can tell, VirnetX is basically a combination of academics and lawyers that won against a real business like Apple.
We've had to evaluate several systems for possible deployment where I work. Invariably, they want to route all calls through a central server. So if someone on a site a hundred miles away wants to talk to someone on the same site, it routes the call all the way back to a main server, then all the way back to the tower and out over the air. Who gives a crap about delay or user experience any more?
Why do they do this? They say customers are requiring all calls to be logged, and sending all traffic back to the server is the only way to do it.
What freaking customers? The NSA?
I've been obsessed with tech since I was a teenager. I do not like what I see on the horizon. Lucky for me, I got to use the Internet before every keystroke I made was logged.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
"Just ask Obama to overturn the ruling."
Requesting the legislative branches not to allocate resources for enforcement is more the current administrations' style.
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patents need to be stopped.
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What? I am eagerly awaiting VirnetX's release of it fabulous point to point video communications software. I mean its sure to be released soon right, right?!
So business should just be able to use someone else's research as they see fit?
Perhaps business does its own research.
There are many problems that have obvious solutions no matter who does the research. Some solutions are inevitable. They aren't supposed to be patented.
I hate trolls but I do remember that Steve Jobs promised at launch the FaceTime was going to be an open standard. It obviously didn't happened and as much as I dislike trolls, there may be some measure of cosmic karma involved...
Both sides in the litigation admit that if Apple routes its FaceTime calls through relay servers, it will avoid infringing the VirnetX patents. Once Apple was found to be infringing—and realized it could end up paying an ongoing royalty for using FaceTime—the company redesigned the system so that all FaceTime calls would rely on relay servers. Lease believes the switch happened in April.
So, from that, it appears that Apple infringed up until April, but no longer does.
Meanwhile, Apple has handed over its customer service logs from April through mid-August to VirnetX's attorneys. At the August 15 hearing, a VirnetX lawyer stated that Apple had logged "over half a million calls" complaining about the quality of FaceTime, according to Lease.
If that's accurate, the data will bolster VirnetX's arguments that its patents are technologically significant, hard to work around, and deserve a high royalty rate.
And if the customers are complaining because it currently uses the sucky work-around, then that also indicates that Apple stopped infringing in April.
The judge and lawyers present at the hearing didn't discuss numbers regarding what a reasonable ongoing royalty might be, but VirnetX is asking for royalty payments of more than $700 million for the ongoing use of FaceTime, according to Lease.
... so why would there be ongoing royalties? If you stop using someone's patented improvement and return to using the previous, public domain system, you shouldn't have to keep paying them royalties. This would be like if someone patented a better mousetrap, and then when you stopped using it, they also wanted you to pay a royalty for owning a cat.
If the owner of the patent Facetime is infringing upon uses rounded corners for their office desks.
Inevitable discovery is a defense, a way of overturning a patent. But people often overestimate what's inevitable. Many good ideas aren't discovered for generations even though all the pieces were in place.
Very well said! The volume of obvious solutions that are patented is ridiculous!
The patents in question describe nothing more than perfectly normal combinations of Internet services that any software engineer who knows basic networking would be expected to create as a matter of course. Combining such services into higher protocols is simply algorithmic construction in network programming.
This patent suit illustrates well the chilling effect that software patents have on our ability to use computers and the Internet to best effect. When you allow software algorithms to be locked away in patents, the ability of engineers to use computers and networks as an enabling technology decreases dramatically, to the extreme detriment of our ability to improve our systems.
Each new software patent just adds further bars to the prison. If this disease isn't stopped soon, the profession is going to be worthless except as a feeding pit for lawyers.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
"Just ask Obama to overturn the ruling." Requesting the legislative branches not to allocate resources for enforcement is more the current administrations' style.
To be fair, that's easier than trying to get the Legislative Branch to *actually* do something (about anything). According to Slate the 113th Congress has passed only 15 bills this year for Obama to sign while "... more than 4,000 bills have been referred to committee this year, where most will die of starvation."
For comparison's sake, George W. Bush signed 13 bills into law on today's date alone [July 12] in 2005—with a Republican majority in both houses, mind you—but seven of those bills were sponsored by Democrats!
Of course, we only have ourselves to blame for voting all these weasels into office...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I've got nothing against patenting good ideas, but the techniques described in the patents involved seem inevitable to me.
But then again juries don't usually include computer engineers so everything computer seems like magic to them.
You are absolutely correct, but the sad truth is that patent laws only require you to submit a working proof of concept within 18 months after filing. The poc doesnt have to be any good only to show the claim in some working order.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
I eagerly await VirnetX's lawsuits against all the SIP phone manufacturers because, as I understand it, SIP allows two phones to directly talk to each other once initial setup is done...
Making direct connection between nodes is so fucking obvious. Any kind of service that would benefit from it, the designers would just do it. A patent that covers that in general adds nothing. A patent with some kind of innovative idea in this area might be possible for ways to improve direct communications. But such an innovative patent would not cover the obvious aspect of direct communication.
The problem is not the patent trolls that exploit bugs in the patent system to their own unjustified financial gain. Instead, the problem is the USPTO that issues patents for obvious ideas just because they were able to find someone in their office that could not think up the idea, which appears to be more than 99% of patent applications. This is where the fix needs to happen. Patents must pass the innovation test and USPTO is not even aware how to do this test.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There is nothing innovative in FaceTime and similar systems that I can see. Handing off video chats to direct connections is an obvious engineering solution; nobody should get a patent on it. Many of the software patents are written by academics with no understanding of engineering or what is actually going on in the real world.
Isn't that the point of fighting to get the law changed... The law shouldn't say that you can sit on an invention and extort money out of people doing useful things. It should say that if you want a monopoly on something, you actually have to fucking use it, and do something useful for the world. Not just stifle everyone else doing something useful.
Emphasis mine:
"Customers who want to develop their own implementation of the VirnetX patented techniques for supporting secure domain names, or other techniques that are covered by our patent portfolio for establishing secure communication links, will need to purchase a patent license."
Hard not to notice the lack of links for say, SDK documentation, samples, registration -- just a statement that you can email them to ask. There are no demos. Also, they have crawling disabled. So I can't, for example, use webarchive to tell how long they have actually been on the web.
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
Okay, they have logged over a half million complaints that had something to do with FaceTime. How many did they log prior to this? How large an increase, if any, was this? Were the additional complaints having to do with something specific that leads anyone to believe it had to do with this change? did these complaints start immediately after the change? Simply the fact that a company the size of Apple has logged that many complaints doesn't seem unusual at all, this article lacks a great deal of context around those numbers.
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That's exactly how SIP based VOIP phones have always worked. The routing information is passed over SIP and the voice connection is free to be routed over a different path, or directly.
I'd read TFA but I can't be bothered. Other comments here mention the patents being filed in 2002/2003. The SIP RFC was filed in mid 2002. Maybe I should be on the lookout for new RFCs and file patents for every one of them that looks interesting.
Yeah... lets have more of them and more absurdity until it really hurts the big companies, nothing is going to be done
I eagerly await VirnetX's lawsuits against all the SIP phone manufacturers because, as I understand it, SIP allows two phones to directly talk to each other once initial setup is done...
Well, the issue is NAT - SIP still has major troubles with it, and Facetime doesn't. And that's what is violating the patent.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Is there more to it than UPNP port opening?
Your browser (Chrome, Firefox) probably already has more advanced technology onboard than Facetime.
It's called WebRTC and allows peer 2 peer video, audio and data communication and it's always encrypted.
If you ask me, it's the right time to start adoption of WebRTC.
New things are always on the horizon
Time for face direct connect.
It is very VERY difficult to judge what was inevitable, because things in hindsight often look obvious.
I could take 10 of the smartest people here, who hadn't seen this patent - only the problem it was supposed to overcome. And we could spitball ideas for a few hours. And maybe come up with a solution. Does that mean it is inevitable?
No, because even though that team possessed the ability to solve the problem, statistically speaking they were not ever tasked to solve the problem, and so would not have done so.
This is why we have multi-disciplinary projects at research institutions - to find discoveries by putting together people with new and different understandings and backgrounds. And what they come up with is novel.
To be inevitable, you would have to come up with a solution that worked, within the existing framework, and was capable of handling the type of data requested.
Patent 1:
Some of that sounds rather basic, but together, with the other involved patents, it is well more complicated than "let's use that p2p stuff I heard about". Please, if you want to, go into the specific claims of the patents and tell me what is inevitable, and how, rather than taking the terrible summaries of the patents as being representative.
Seems Napster was setting up peer to peer connections around 1998 or 1999.
I'm not sure how this invention isn't obvious after Napster.
Here are a couple of the patents Apple was found to have infringed. They actually look non-obvious to me. Basically they're about running a special DNS proxy server that catches non-standard requests, checks credentials in some fashion, and either sets up a just-in-time VPN, passes them through to a normal DNS server, or returns an error. They also don't seem to be a troll company; it looks like this work was done as a government contract.
I didn't look for any details on how Facetime peer-to-peer worked so I don't know if the ruling is correct and generally I consider software non-patentable (copyright and trade secret should be enough) but this is not what I'd call a meritless patent troll case.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%252Fnetahtml%252FPTO%252Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6502135.PN.&OS=PN/6502135&RS=PN/6502135
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%252Fnetahtml%252FPTO%252Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7418504.PN.&OS=PN/7418504&RS=PN/7418504
Graham
Is there more to it than UPNP port opening?
I imagine it's UDP hole punching: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching
had the crappiest time using FaceTime for D&D last Wednesday. Knowing that I'm not using a direct connection would explain the crappy video quality, frequent disconnects, and audio dropouts. Guess we'll have to start using a second SKYPE account.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
a small company's attempt to compete in the marketplace against a free offering from Apple.
FaceTime is available bundled with the iPhone, and the iPhone itself is not a free offering. VirnetX could have tried to make its application a standard across every platform that isn't Apple's.
No doubt terrorists are using Facetime and holding up pieces of paper with messages on them in order to force the NSA to automatically OCR every frame of video. You'd think these guys have nothing better to do.
It isn't obvious if multiple other people discovered it independently for example. And Apple's own experience is evidence. Might not be enough evidence but it is some. As Samsung was able to prove against Apple on some patents.