Vonage Barred From Using Verizon VoIP Patents

thefiremonk writes "Bloomberg reports that U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton has issued a permanent injunction against Vonage. The goal: to stop allowing customers to make calls to standard phone lines. 'U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton approved Verizon's request for a block today in Alexandria, Virginia. Hilton said he won't sign the order before a hearing in two weeks on Vonage's request for a stay. A jury found March 8 that Vonage infringed three patents and should pay Verizon $58 million.' Does this spell doom for the already troubled Vonage? "

Yep.

[russotto]

If the order isn't stayed pending appeal, Vonage is dead; revenue drops to zero nearly overnight. So are all other independent VoIP providers, when Verizon gets around to crushing them.

A concrete manifestation of a patent system out of control.

Vonage's official response

[rGauntlet]

Via a Press Release on their site: http://pr.vonage.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=2 35198 [vonage.com]

One interesting tidbit:

"We are confident Vonage customers will not experience service interruptions or other changes as a result of this litigation," said Mike Snyder, Vonage's chief executive officer.
.
.
"Our appeal centers on erroneous patent claim construction, and we remain confident that Vonage has not infringed on any of Verizon's patents - a position we will continue to vigorously assert in federal appeals court," said Sharon O'Leary, Vonage's executive vice president, chief legal officer and secretary. "Vonage relied on open-standard, off-the-shelf technology when developing its service. In fact, evidence introduced in court failed to prove that Vonage relied on Verizon's VoIP technology, and instead showed that in 2003 Verizon began exploring ways to copy Vonage's technology," she added.

Re:What's the infringement?

[interiot]

Here's the original 7 patents [ipurbia.com]... #6,430,275, #6,137,869, #6,104,711, #6,282,574, #6,128,304, #6,298,062, and #6,359,880.

It sounds like #6,430,275 (tiff [uspto.gov], pdf [pat2pdf.org], text/png [google.com]) is the one that's the VOIP/POTS bit.

Re:Just a thought

[DogDude]

Have any of us bothered to look at the patents? Are they good and valid? Did Verizon truly invent something, and thus, perhaps, because of their investment, deserve some level of protection against theft in exchange for them contributing to the overall body of knowledge? Perhaps these patents are bogus, but I haven't seen anyone in this discussion yet attack Verizon/the PTO on the merits of the patents.

By "us", do you mean the kids and geeks who read Slashdot, as opposed to the professional patent attorneys that work for Verizon and Vonage? Do you really think that it matters what a bunch of unqualified regular people who happen to read a geek blog think?

Patent 6430275

[Dan Stephans II]

I quickly read through the patent that appears to be at issue here (6430275) and I don't think it's purely the connection from a VOIP connection to a PSTN/POTS line (although that's covered I don't think it passes muster from a non-obviousness/prior art standpoint). The meat of this patent deals with call tracking and billing (starting at around page 5) and to me it stands out as the most reasonable area to pursue vonage. I could be wrong too. =) Nothing in the application struck me as terribly original.

Re:Is the injunction legal?

[cdrudge]

There are many technical details why I think the injunction was granted but a stay will also be issued. You point out one very good one just because millions currently use VoIP. There also would be catastrophic damage done to Vonage if the stay was granted but minimal damage to Verizon (and what damage could be recouped) if the stay was granted but later lifted.

Considering...

[Svartalf]

...that I've seen the quality of "professional" IP counsel up close, I can tell you that many of them
aren't any better at it than we are, believe it or not. I've got one of the better lawyers in the field
as my patent attorney, and he's razor sharp and what meets your apparent picture of them. The previous
joker, also a lawyer at the Law Firm we retained, heh... Many, VERY many of them only pretend to know
what is and isn't viable or not. If I were Vonage, I'd have fired their litigators and got better ones.

The patents are pretty much rubbish in the first place and were largely rubber-stamped into existence.

Re:What's the infringement?

[Jason Pollock]

If it's 6,430,275, I personally developed the same class of product (PSTN/VoIP gateway with prepaid charging and authentication) in 98/99. We had been doing the same with ISUP and AIN variants even earlier.

It should appear obvious to any telecom's protocol engineer that this is possible. It is even encouraged by the protocols.

For example, INAP (ITU version of AIN in the patent), uses the same call model as ISUP, the circuit control protocol. ISUP and H.323 are both Q.931 protocols, therefore they also share the same call model. That makes it obvious (it was to us), that H.323 can be easily made to trigger an INAP call model. Obviously, the benefit is that this ensures that the applications can run unchanged on both the PSTN and the VoIP networks.

And H.323 has been around for a lot longer than this patent.

Once you understand that H.323 and ISUP are Q.931 variants, you see that all the work done to trigger IN applications on the various country and network ISUP variants is also prior art.

Re:Patent seems too obvious

[lnklnklnk]

Look at the patent date.

The patent was filed by BBN Laboratories (now Verizon Labs), in the mid-to-late 1980s. BBN just never enforced it (or cared to).

Re:Telco ripoff

[Anonymous Coward]

POTS [wikipedia.org], not POTs

VoIP [wikipedia.org], not VOip