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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?
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?
It can just be told to experts in terms of the costs. A huge loop out via a huge US telco can be very a cheap way to get back into a region for that data use without paying full price two regional telcos direct.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Sarbones-oxley - and similar laws can mean that you are required to log buisness transactions.
patents need to be stopped.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
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?!
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.
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.
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.
Time to open an office in Dublin and move the operations.
Have gnu, will travel.
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
Akamai has several streaming media solutions. One example http://www.akamai.com/html/solutions/sola-vision.html
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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.
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.
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