British Telecom Claims Patents on VOIP Session Initiation Protocol 116
An anonymous reader writes with bad news for operators of SIP gateways. From the article: "VoIP-to-PSTN termination providers and SIP vendors will be watching their inboxes for a lawyer's letter from BT, which has kicked off a licensing program levying a fee on the industry, based on a list of 99 patents .. The British incumbent is offering to allow third parties to use the Session Initiation Protocol under a license agreement... BT is requesting either $US50,000 or a combination of 0.3 percent of future revenue from affected products, plus 0.3 percent of the last six months' sales for products as 'past damages.' It's kindly offering a discount for customers that pay up within six weeks of receiving a BT letter of demand, and there's a premium to $US60,000 and 0.36 percent of revenue for those who hold out."
Hyperlink Patent (Score:5, Informative)
Reminds me of the hidden page patent.
I'm sure this will go the same way.
http://www.zdnet.com/bt-loses-hyperlink-patent-case-3002121257/ [zdnet.com]
Re:No more Gotcha! patent suits (Score:5, Informative)
There needs to be some sort of "horse has left the barn" exemption to patent enforceability. If a patent holder sits quietly and watches while an industry develops around something they believe to be infringing, it's not reasonable to allow them to wait until billions of dollars are at stake and then suddenly show up with a demand for payment.
That's not at all in the spirit of patent law. The purpose was to allow the patent holder the ability to exploit their own invention, not to allow them to sit on their asses doing nothing and then exploit everyone else's work.
Yeah... some sort of "you intentionally waited too long to enforce your rights, and as a result, the infringers are in an unreasonably worse position now than they would've been had you acted at little faster" rule. Or like you say, the "horse has left the barn, so why bother latching it up". We could even call it the laches [wikipedia.org] rule.
Re:who cares (Score:4, Informative)
Excuse me, but before it was sold off BT was making about £3 billion a years gross profit.
Prior Art: MMUSIC (Score:5, Informative)
Initial Internet drafts for a Session Invitation Protocol and a Simple Conference Invitation Protocol were prepared in 1996, and merged to a single first draft of SIP by December 1996 (slide 10 [columbia.edu]), with further drafts (2-12) leading up to the publication of RFC 2543 in March of 1999 (slides 11-13, ibid.).
I don't see anything that says BT had a hand in anything to do with SIP up to 1996. More than half the patents BT claims (Exhibit C [btplc.com]) were filed after RFC 2543 was published.
I hope this information is a useful starting point for some SIP vendor.
These scumbags claimed to own 'hyperlinks' (Score:0, Informative)
BT (British Telecom) is a monumentally corrupt British company that filters back vast amounts of money into the pockets of British politicians. It was, and effectively still is, the POTS monopoly in the UK (curiously excluding one small region of Britain for historic reasons. While BT was a legal monopoly, Britain had some of the highest phone charges, and least choice in end-user equipment options, in the First World. Swimming in cash like all Britain's utility monopolies, BT would invest in laughably bad R+D projects, given the world atrocities like Prestel, a service so bad it made the original AOL like like the current Internet.
Prestel is significant because, of course, it became the basis of BT claiming it owned 'hyperlinks', and that everything on the Internet owed them royalties. A billion pieces of prior art sank that claim in a hurricane of hilarity. In Britain, the BBC would always tell the sheeple that EVERYTHING had been invented in Britain, and that the British version was, of course, the best. You will still get dummies here defending the work of BT, for instance. Monopolies do APPEAR to have dabbled in a lot of key technology areas, but this is entirely a consequence of obscenely large pools of cash being available with no accountability. Of course some of this money sloshes into 'pet projects' of managers with an interest in technology.
Interestingly, the putrid Prestel died not because it was so crap (which it most certainly was), but because unlike Mintel, the French equivalent, Prestel was a 'walled garden' where almost every form of potential content was deemed 'controversial', and thus banned. The irony is that years later, after privatisation, BT would make new fortunes from the criminal gangs who ran the so-called 'sex-lines'.
Britain largely has the dense urban populations that would easily benefit from the same digital cable technology one sees rolled out in Singapore and South Korea. Brits have an unending appetite for technology. Sadly, the hyper-corrupt BT, and a bunch of even worse TV cable companies, control the cabled communications infrastructure in the UK. The cable infrastructure is only ungraded when the UK government decides to roll out more sophisticated citizen surveillance projects- the cameras and under-road tire RFID trackers that make Britain more '1984' than Orwell would ever dared to have imagined.
BT has a portfolio of patents that you might understand by considering the same from IBM. BT had a finger in an incredible number of pies, none of which it 'cooked', but all of which it corruptly claims inventors rights over. Lots of things do get invented in Britain, but vanishingly few of these came from BT. BT's claims always have the form "we implemented an idea already in existence but not widely used, so we now own that idea".
Re:Prior Art: MMUSIC (Score:5, Informative)