On 3/11/07, Philip Mullis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This is incredibly silly, does anyone know what the actual pattents are partaining about voip? the register quotes but does not give any detail about wifi being used for voip. This sounds quite perposterous, does this mean anyone using asterisk or cisco switches going to be suspect to a Verizon lawsuit? What did Verizon invent that is so propriety that Vonage is using?
That's the worst part about US patent law. You don't really have to invent anything, you can just vaguely describe something that a patent clerk won't understand and you've got it. And, it's a landmine that you don't have to disclose until someone actually makes some money, then you can sue them. There are ridiculous patents around voicemail. Vonage is being sued on another front for infringing on a patent for "software that gives users a visual notification of new voicemails that can be retrieved by clicking a link." (http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=98808) Think about how trivial that would be to implement in Asterisk and how much trouble you could get into. I don't even know who would be liable?? If I wrote the software, released it into the public domain and tens of thousands of users adopted it, I suppose they could claim that they were damaged to the tune of a few dollars per mailbox then sue me, even though I hadn't made a dime on the thing. They could argue that if the customer had bought a competing Nortel product (and Nortel may have given them patents in exchange for indemnity) that they would have benefited but the didn't benefit from my software. What's really irritating is that they don't even have to develop the software, they can just describe some process that isn't already patented or in the public domain and it's all theirs. The patent office has demonstrated some lack of diligence on the public domain stuff too. Someone applied for and was granted a patent for the combover. I tried to find a link for that but most of the links to the uspto site seem to be broken, maybe it was overturned. It was on slashdot quite a while ago so maybe they changed the link. Anyway, patents create huge landmines to development. There was a thread discussing Asterisk's possible violation of those absurd voicemail patents. It was in one of the Digium discussion lists. Dave
