Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/06/sprint_nextel_vonage_trial/
Sprint Nextel and Verizon jury trials have Vonage on the brink
Patent defeat wounds Vonage further
Posted in Networks, 6th October 2007 07:02 GMT
Sprint has won a second jury trial over patent infringement against US VoIP service Vonage, in what is an echo of the defeat inflicted earlier by Verizon.
The patent numbers used in the Sprint Nextel case versus Vonage could all be about the same patent, the process of mapping a narrowband message, for instance a PSTN network, to packet based networks. This is the same kind of territory the Verizon patents came from and it's all about connecting VoIP to the PSTN.
The Verizon patents were about handoffs from switched circuits to VoIP and funnily enough that's just what the Sprint patents are all about, except in every case they talk solely about translation into Asynchronous Transfer Mode. The Verizon stuff also dealt with issues relating to how a call is billed or authorised when it comes from a VoIP network to a switched circuit system.
What is interesting is that Vonage uses standard off the shelf Soft Switches supplied by companies that have been operating in the area for years and which for the most part have patent sharing agreements with these companies, but these are not under suit. The technology that Vonage uses is not its own, but is basic VoIP best practice among suppliers.
Neither case is about any of the SIP patents, because these are held largely by AT&T, which it rightly declared when setting the SIP standard. SIP or session initiation protocol is used at the core of the vast majority of VoIP implementations and is an IETF standard. It will also be used at the core of future IMS architectures and although there may be royalties payable by equipment makers, that’s all part and parcel of the VoIP community going forwards.
While we are not telecoms engineers, it seems to us that what is at stake here is that the US telcos believe that VoIP as such is not the issue. What is the issue is connecting VoIP systems to their older PSTN networks. Once an obvious and simple mapping appears between the two systems and it is patented, it shuts the door on the entire VoIP industry. So those patents were applied for and awarded with the sole intention of keeping VoIP networks OUT of PSTN connectivity.
This leads us to the view that a Supreme Court Appeal has to reverse these decisions, and that the US Federal Communication Commission needs to step in and make it clear that Telcos cannot expect to rule the roost on connectivity to their networks through the backdoor of dubious patents.
The Sprint case talks about Joe Christie, an employee at Sprint’s Advanced Technology Laboratory coming up with most of the Sprint patents. Christie died in 1996 says the court transcript, and yet most of the filings in his name are filed after that date.
Patent number 6,473,429 was filed in 1999 and refers to connecting Asynchronous Transfer Mode to a circuit switched architecture, patent number 6,665,294 was filed in 2002 and refers to connecting Asynchronous Transfer Mode to a circuit switched architecture. Patent number 6,298,064 was filed in 2000. Guess what it referred to?
The same wording was used on almost every one of these patents, and yet there was prior art in abundance throughout that period and the patents themselves referred to ITU standards and the IEEE Journal, with items going back to the 1980s, which again used very similar statements.
The patent 5,991,301 was filed in 1995 using virtually the same words. And again in 2000, patent number 6,452,932 was filed. Many of these had identical wording, the same diagrams and referred to prior patent applications which had long since been abandoned, reworded and re-applied for.
What is ridiculous is that many of us that were around in technology pre-1980 know we saw demonstrations of VoIP over 25 years ago, and that there are oceans of prior art, and yet a jury trial is called where a big brand is up against a company that many of the jury will never have heard of and they are only asked to consider if the upstart is using the technology in the filings. They are not asked the broader question of who invented VoIP and its connection to PSTN.
The creation of VoIP was not down to these patents, and is not purely a US invention. There is a huge amount of prior art that has left a 20 year paper trail and the best way of cutting through it is NOT to ask the man in the street, but to give someone time to become expert and then make a ruling.
So far the jury ordered Vonage to pay Sprint Nextel $69.5m and given that this immediately follows in the heels of a virtually identical Verizon Jury trial with the same outcome, Vonage investors have left in droves and the company has been deprived of the oxygen of further investment.
Vonage must now pay Sprint a five per cent royalty to go with the 5.5 per cent royalty awarded to Verizon for virtually the same patents. Vonage continues to insist it can pay the $58m damages for Verizon and the $69.5m that the court this week has awarded to Sprint.
Already a first appeal to the Verizon case has been heard and the case sent back to the lower court for clarification, a move which will lower the charges and perhaps lower that royalty.
If Verizon and Sprint can get Vonage out of business, what's to stop them going after the cable operators that also connect to their networks and map VoIP traffic onto circuit switched equipment? The perhaps it can go after Cisco and then every other equipment supplier?
The truth is this is an attempt to pull the wool over a jury's eye so that these massive telcos can rid themselves of the VoIP rival that has taken the lion's share of VoIP customers away from it, some 2.4 million. Surely the Supreme Court has to fix that for the benefit of progress.
After all, these rulings are saying that the modern IP based system will be killed off by denying it connectivity with the old and out of date PSTN networks. We always thought that patents were about promoting innovation, not putting impossible blocks in its way.
Copyright © 2007, Faultline
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