AT&T Joins The Party Of Jealous Telcos: Sues Vonage For Patent Infringement
from the anyone-else-want-in? dept
If you can't beat 'em, sue 'em for patent infringement. That seems to be the lesson that various telcos have learned in dealing with Vonage. Having seen Verizon and Sprint win big awards for patent infringement against Vonage, AT&T has now sued the company for patent infringement as well. The story, once again, is exactly the same. AT&T tried, and failed, to compete with Vonage in the marketplace. So now that they've lost, they've sued. It has nothing to do with Vonage "stealing" any technology. The technology behind VoIP is fairly straightforward. Perhaps that's why it seems like everyone claims to have VoIP patents. At this point, it's just ridiculous piling on against the first company that actually figured out how to market a VoIP telephone replacement service by a bunch of telcos who refused to innovate.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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Filed Under: patents, telcos, voip
Companies: at&t, sprint, verizon, vonage
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Any patents left over at Vonage?
What I'd love to see is Vonage turn around and say, "Exactly how non-obvious are these patented ideas if everyone and their brother can sue us over them?" Hopefully, AT&T's suit is the tipping point for a patent judge to realize that the patents should be invalid (for obviousness or broadness) if 3 major companies could find some grounds for a lawsuit.
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wha?
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Re: wha?
Because it's quite expensive and time consuming to fight these patents...
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Attorney fees aren't exactly cheap, and these cases can take a long time. It's not a matter that can be settled within a few hours. (though from our vantage point, it might seem that way, because most of these cases are just frivolous)
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Re: wha?
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When You Don't Have The Cash To Fight, You Switch.
A method to carry voice conversations over a TCP/IP network using analog to digital and digital to analog conversion.
Prior art would be the first analog to digital audio patent.
I think the reason Vonage is not fighting all these suits tooth and nail, is that they are not able to because of the cost.
As to jury verdicts in patent suits, most juries are made up of the functional equivalent of the 67 year old woman who can even turn on a computer.
Vonage started to take market share, so it has to be stomped out
The reason I went to Vonage was all the taxes on my POTS land line. I mean 26 bucks for all the calling you want is not to bad, before Vonage I paid 32 dollars just for the privilege of a land line and that was before I used long distance.
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Vonage and Copyright
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Calling Class Action Lawyers.......
Screw you AT&T.
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Maybe Vonage settled the Sprint lawsuit because they knew they were going to lose?
I guess the AT&T suit pretty much rules out Sprint buying them (something I never thought would happen) but it made for a nice article.
Yeah, Vonage brought VoIP to the masses (well, sort of) while the telco's didn't. Of course, if you don't worry about losing money in order to gain customers and run commercials everywhere, I guess you can do that. I wouldn't call that a good business plan, but you can.
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Re:
Vonage is only losing money because they are getting sued by the big dinosaures who can only wright up patents that should be invalid. Seems obvious to me that these patents are far to obvious and broad.
As a reminder to you, patents are to encourage innovation. Vonige innovated, Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T failed to.
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It's worth noting here that juries almost *ALWAYS* rule in favor of the patent holder, as they rarely have the technical knowledge to determine whether or not a patent is crap.
Maybe Vonage settled the Sprint lawsuit because they knew they were going to lose?
Indeed, but they could still lose and it wouldn't change the questionable nature of the patents.
Yeah, Vonage brought VoIP to the masses (well, sort of) while the telco's didn't. Of course, if you don't worry about losing money in order to gain customers and run commercials everywhere, I guess you can do that. I wouldn't call that a good business plan, but you can.
Both Verizon and AT&T launched nearly identical (and eventually identically priced) services to Vonage, but were unable to capture significant marketshare. So to argue that it's all about price is simply, factually wrong.
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Fucking Sprint: "Thank you Verizon, I am sure they will just pay whatever I want... I am just happy that I'll do them when they are tired... thanks for loosening them up... Yo, AT&T... your joy will be even better... there will be almost no waiting time for you to cash out from these guys, sounds good?"
Fucking AT&T: "You guys rock! lemme know when you are done, so I can finish them off, but hey... please thank 'The People' for agreeing that we can screw them, if it wasn't for them, we'd probably be the ones being completely screwed. I guess we'll have to sponsor some landlines to these good samaritans that understood how bad Vonage is for America and American business."
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AT&T's lost maybe 800k subscribers to Vonage (compared to about 2.8M lost to cable), and still has 59.4M lines in service. Vonage's growth is slowing down and will probably plateau at around 3M, about 5% of AT&T's total line count.
And AT&T's stodgy old-fashioned POTS is generating about 40% more revenue per line than Vonage.
So how, exactly, has AT&T "failed to compete with Vonage in the marketplace?"
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Moe may have a point...
1.Since all three of these companies are suing over patents related to VoIP then doesn't that mean that those three companies are probably violating each others patents? But I'm sure there is more than enough coprorate back scratching to clear that up.
2.How non-obvious can these VoIP patents be if three companies are ganging up on Vonage to for lawsuits? If only there was some way to have those patents rendered invalid.
2.If by chance AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint are all going after Vonage over "different" patents that all realted to VoIP doesn't that mean that anyone that is not one of those three companies will either have to pay outrageous licensing fees or be sued out of existence?
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VoIP is a pretty basic thing, getting it to work with the PSTN isn't. How you go about doing these things is where Vonage voilated Verizon's patents, probably Sprints patents and now AT&T.
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If getting VoIP to work with PSTN (not sure what that is) is infringing on Verizon's, Sprint's, and AT&T's patents, then it still seems kinda obvious that it's obvious.
Kinda a dumb question here, but if you can call a Sprint customer from a Verizon phone then doesn't there have to be some kind of universal language (so to speak) that both phone companies have to speak to work together? Isn't it the same with Sprint and AT&T, or AT&T and Verizon? Why is it that when Vonage uses the same universal connection they are infringing?
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VoiceWing and CallVantage were not priced as low as Vonage, nor was it ever advertised as heavily. Neither service was targeted to combat Vonage, but more for battle with cable companies.
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battery
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