A federal jury in Alexandria, VA handed down a very disturbing decision against Vonage’s usage of VoIP technologies patented by Verizon.

This decision, if not overturned, will have a serious impact on the continued growth of VoIP Services. I fear that Verizion’s lack of ability to produce a profit with their existing business model may start targeting other VoIP Providers versus actually innovating new products and services.

In case anyone is interested (or cares), Google Patent search found these three patent listings:

Enhanced signaling for terminating resource
This patent was not filed until 1999. Companies like VocalTec, Clarent and I believe Cisco had VoIP solutions in place prior to this patent being submitted. Hell even my former employer claims to have started doing VoIP in 1997. Surely prior art can be found for this patent.

Network session management
Wait a minute, doesn’t any cell phone company in the world manage both TDM (traditional) and ‘packet’ based networks?

Method, server and telecommunications system for name translation on a conditional basis…
Which sounds a whole like the DNS system the internet is so dependant upon.

Lets hope the appeals process actually takes into account the possible impact of letting such a ludicous decision stand.

Update:

Karl Auerbach, aka Cavebear, added some relevant and interesting legalease explaination for us non-lawyers:

Patents (in the US) require a couple of things:

- Novelty, which merely means that something is new. This is a pretty easy hurdle - a telephone that wiggles like Elvis rather than rings would be novel.

- Non obvious. This is the hard one - and where us techies and the patent office tend to disagree. Those of us who have been on the net dealing with computers tend to find a lot of things that are patented to be obvious. But not to the patent examiners who, until recently, were educated in technologies other than networking and computers.

I am considering filing a patent on a business method that involves the filing of patents that are trivial, and to some, obvious extensions of what has been done before. That way I can enjoin those stupid companies that do business this way.

As for prior stuff - we did “etherphones” at Interop in 1991 or sometime in that period. And folks like Steve Casner, then at ISI, were doing network video over radio, involving vans driving on US 101 near Palo Alto, back in the 1970s and 1980s. –Karl–

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