Posted by Barlow Keener

We have entered the time of the VoIP patent wars.  Verizon Services Corp. v. Vonage Holdings Corp., No. 1:06-CV-00682 (E.D. Va.) (See, Verizon v Vonage Feb 12, 2007 Order) delivered the first tenative, but not final, results.   The positive about this case, according to comments made by Bingham McCutchen telecom patent attorney Ed Pennington  at VON Spring 2007, is that there is a 50% - 50% chance that upon de novo review the decision will be overturned.   

Ed understands telecom patent issues  well.  One of his first depositions covered the well-known Ronald Katz telecom patents.  Mr. Katz allegedly collected $1 billion as a result of receiving extremely broad telecom patents covering touch tone and IVR. The Verizon VoIP patents are not the only VoIP patents being litigated.  Take a look at C2 Communications Technology Inc. v Verizon, Qwest, BellSouth, Sprint, and Level3, filed on June 15, 2006, claiming an infringement of C2 VoIP Patent No. 6,243,373.

In the law, like life itself, nothing is certain.  As baseball great and competitior Casey Stengel put it: “Never make predictions, especially about the future.”  The press and others are missing finer, though significant points, in the orders flowing from the decisions.  Blawger Barry Barnet made this point clear when he noted that Judge Claude Hilton in Verizon v. Vonage actually never entered an injunction order last Friday as reported widely in the press.  It is as though the press and others smell blood.  They have written off VoIP based on the order of a single trial court.  The press now seems to believe, as fact, that the trial court order unearthed the true inventor the process of translating VoIP calls to the PSTN.   

Now that the Vonage case is in the front page, early VoIP businesses and creators (recall Net2Phone (1996) and DialPad (2000)) are beginning to dig up the prior art.  VoIP calls were being “translated” from a name to a number and delivered to the PSTN before 1999.   We should expect to see prior art showing up on a telecom blog soon.