OK, I was wrong, dialing out was nothing new by the time this patent was filed in March 1998 and granted in September 2002, and neither was IP teleconferencing, call forwarding, message routing, paging services, or any of the other claims made by this patent. Researching this question turned out to be much easier than I thought it would be. I hereby inject mass snark: if a nosy shitkicking blogger like me could find this out in 20 minutes on Google, the U.S. Patent & Trade Office should have been able to find it.

VoIP was invented — I use the word advisedly, these fellows were true inventors — in Israel in about 1995. They patented the technology and the patents are assigned to the first VoIP company to offer service: VocalTec, which released the Internet Phone software application in 1995. I’d just like to toss in here that I love the fact that VocalTec is still in business. Like Skype and the Gizmo project, Vocaltec was computer only, no handset. Just microphones and sound cards and speakers. Check out this passage from a review of Internet Phone 4 in the 1996/1997 CTI Buyer’s Guide for Management (page 29 of the .pdf file):

Internet Phone includes voice mail, call holding, call waiting, muting, blocking, caller ID, and directory assistance. Other communication and transmission features of Internet Phone include whiteboarding, file transfer, cross-platform communications, text chat, direct calling and public chat rooms.

Funnily enough, one of the bonuses included in the purchase of Internet Release 4 was Earthlink Network TotalAccess, EarthLink being another defendent in the lawsuit under discussion.

Not only could you have voice conferences with this software, you could also have video conferences with hands free, voice activation. All this and more, at least six years before Web Telephony was granted its patent. Incidentally, the review has a screen shot of the animated dialing assistant. Even back then softward developers were coming up with assistant far less obnoxious than Microsoft’s stupid paper clip. Internet Phone required that the party on the other end of the call/communication also had to be using Internet Phone and the user preferences were set via the installed software, not the internet. But moving user management of user accounts from software to internet is no great leap of innovation. eBay and Amazon.com were already doing it at the time this patent was granted. I don’t even have to research that; the phone room I was slaving in part-time in those years was full of eBay addicts.

So it seems to me that everything Web Telephony is claiming in this patent can easily be cited as prior art and not original. Note that the patent does not say how the “invention” in this patent can be assembled and used. It simpy says in many pages and long words that everything necessary for it can be bought off the shelf at Best Buy.

On to the other patent cited in the lawsuit, number 6,785,266, filed in 2002 about a week before the previous patent was granted, granted on August 31, 2004 and also titled “Internet Controlled Telephone System”. The abstract of the later patent is verbatim the same abstract for the earlier, indeed, most of the later patent is verbatim from the earlier. This later patent serves only to makes additional claims not in terms of service or function, but that refer to a “call processing apparatus” that is not present in the earlier. I have to wonder if this filing was in reaction to the fact that in 1998, Nortel and Cisco introduced VoIP equipment that was capable of switching, which previously had been managed by the CPU running the VoIP software. This new equipment made the VoIP service independent of the computer, a technology trend that would continue until the VoIP phones we have today. In fact the dingus that runs between my cable modem and my VoIP handset right now is a Cisco/LinkSys product.

And yes, I am quite aware of the irony of the above, considering that it is a select line of Cisco VoIP phone handset stations that they forgot to brand with iPhone copyright they bought until a couple of months before Apple debuted the real thing. No less ironic than the winner of the Verizon vs. Vonage patent infringement lawsuit immediately being sued itself alongside Vonage for infringing its own patent.

I think the U.S. Patent & Trade Office needs to adopt a new logo: