No One Ever Would Have Planned To Put Voice, Video And Data On A Single Network Without A Patent
from the who-would-have-thought-of-that? dept
Another day, another incredibly broad and obvious patent claim. Broadband Reports points us to a patent awarded to Cisco earlier this year for a System and method for providing integrated voice, video and data to customer premises over a single network. Yes, that sounds like the commonly accepted definition of the "triple play," which until now no one had suggested was such a unique and non-obvious concept that it deserved a patent. Now, you might say that they could be explaining a very specific and non-obvious way of accomplishing this, but as the folks at Light Reading point out, the actual patent seems broadly worded to cover just about all triple play deployments. Once again, this highlights the need for an "obviousness" test, rather than just a prior art test. It may be true that there were no triple play offerings available in 2000, when the patent was filed, but that doesn't mean people weren't thinking about it. In fact, the bottleneck wasn't that people didn't know how to offer voice, video and data over a single network, but that the bandwidth just wasn't available yet.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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ok new patent
voice, video, data, annnd my boot! over a network
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Worthless Patent
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It all end here.
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Self Defense
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Re: Self Defense
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Re: Obviousness
They sort of can -- That's what obviousness is all about. If everybody was thinking about it, it must have been obvious to all persons learned in the art, and thereby is not patentable.
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VVD
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I'll be the first to claim prior art on this one..
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Yeah, Wright
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Lunch Triple Play
The Lunch Triple Play.
Then preemptively sue all the fast food chains for stealing my idea.
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