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Sprint Wins $140M Verdict Against Time Warner Cable For Infringing VoIP Patents (arstechnica.com)
Sprint "may have just scored its biggest payout yet," reports Ars Technica, pointing out that Sprint's been filing lawsuits over its VoIP patents for more than a decade. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
On Friday, a jury in Sprint's home district of Kansas City said that Time Warner Cable, now part of Charter Communications, must pay $139.8 million for infringing several patents related to VoIP technology. The jury found that TWC's infringement was willful, which means that the judge could increase the damage award up to three times its value... Sprint filed the lawsuits that led to Friday's verdict in 2011, when it sued TWC along with Comcast, Cox, and Cable One, saying the competing companies violated 12 different Sprint business VoIP patents.
The article points out that Comcast's response was to immediately file a countersuit, which so far has resulted in an early $7.5 million verdict in their favor.
The article points out that Comcast's response was to immediately file a countersuit, which so far has resulted in an early $7.5 million verdict in their favor.
Here's the information that I found in about two minutes:
The Asterisk community has known about the Sprint patents for many years, and has looked at them.
They probably never affected Asterisk. One patent, however, is about a specific method of silence suppression. Asterisk used some method of silence suppression. It's possible that in the past it used the patented method.
The Asterisk community has had many years to adjust, such as by switching to a different method of silence suppression if needed.
Sprint has sued the big phone companies whose infringement is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It's probably not worth it to them to sue some company handling dozens of calls per day even if your infringement were flagrant and intentional.