Disclaimer: I work for Vonage (not for legal department)
The reason we still have to pay as far as I understand it is because we never actually got a court to side with us on the issues of whether we actually infringed on the patents, and if the patents were obvious. The appeals court held up the district court's ruling on the two patents. So from that, we still are infringing in the view of the courts. The original ruling was for $56 mil + 5.5% of future revenue. So that $80 if we got the injunction thrown out would cover the original ruling. Remember, the money was thrown out and the district court had to re investigate the award we would have owed (which could possibly make it worse even). So from my understanding, the $80 would cover what we have had to pay up till now. Also, from what I read in the news, we already had $88 mil in escrow for payment after the case was over. Since this is usually counted as money we don't have, if we had to pay only $80 mil, we would actually earn $8 mil back.
There are 3 patents in all. 2 of these cover the switching between IP telephony and PSTN telephony. These patents use the ideas of ip->ip calls, pstn->pstn calls, and basically what is a DNS setup in between to facilitate the switching of packets between these two types of telephony networks. Verizon claims the "dns" part as the actual invention, although the patents just contain an idea, and no actual description of how it is implemented. This switching problem was worked on by SIP and H.323 in efforts to develop open standards in conjunction with Microsoft, Cisco, and other companies, and from what I understand, even earlier by 3Com.
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Disclaimer: I work for Vonage (not for legal department) The reason we still have to pay as far as I understand it is because we never actually got a court to side with us on the issues of whether we actually infringed on the patents, and if the patents were obvious. The appeals court held up the district court's ruling on the two patents. So from that, we still are infringing in the view of the courts. The original ruling was for $56 mil + 5.5% of future revenue. So that $80 if we got the injunction thrown out would cover the original ruling. Remember, the money was thrown out and the district court had to re investigate the award we would have owed (which could possibly make it worse even). So from my understanding, the $80 would cover what we have had to pay up till now. Also, from what I read in the news, we already had $88 mil in escrow for payment after the case was over. Since this is usually counted as money we don't have, if we had to pay only $80 mil, we would actually earn $8 mil back.
There are 3 patents in all. 2 of these cover the switching between IP telephony and PSTN telephony. These patents use the ideas of ip->ip calls, pstn->pstn calls, and basically what is a DNS setup in between to facilitate the switching of packets between these two types of telephony networks. Verizon claims the "dns" part as the actual invention, although the patents just contain an idea, and no actual description of how it is implemented. This switching problem was worked on by SIP and H.323 in efforts to develop open standards in conjunction with Microsoft, Cisco, and other companies, and from what I understand, even earlier by 3Com.
For Microsoft "Profit" is #2. There is no "???".