Vonage and Verizon — Prepare for Round 2

According to the New York Times, Vonage is preparing to take it's case back down to the lower courts for a retrial of the lawsuit against them from Verizon. Their hope is that with newer approaches set forth by the supreme court that the lower courts will be able to decide whether Verizon's patent(s) are ordinary/obvious or deserve patent protection. I wonder if this time it will be more obvious to the courts that Verizon's patents aren't so original?

Ordinary and obvious?

[Stormwave0]

Forgive me as it's been a while since I looked at the patent documents. But I do recall posters here on slashdot found prior art that could (possibly) be used to deem the patents invalid. Why try to invalidate a patent on obviousness when you can just use prior art? Seems like that would be the easier option.

Re:This is great news

[Morkano]

I don't know how this lawsuit is hurting them financially, but it can't be all bad. I just moved and was looking for a phone solution a while back. I was considering just ditching a landline and getting a cell. But then I saw these articles on Slashdot and actually saw how cheap Vonage was. $20/mo for everything, how can you beat that? There's no contract, only a $40 installation fee.

Even if they crash at the end of the summer, I'll have only paid $30/mo for a good phone system. I call that a good deal.

Re:At the end of the day

[dgatwood]

JPEG, WMV, and most other codecs mostly do minor adaptations to compression techniques that have been around since the 1960s, and as such, should have very few valid patents (despite the huge number of patents that have been granted in these areas).

Codecs are also a good example of when interoperability should trump patentability. IMHO, data formats and the means needed to convert data formats to a standard format should not be protected under any body of intellectual property law (including patents), as this leads inevitably to vendor lock-in. In other words, decompressing technology should be legal to implement under all circumstances without any license.