Vonage denied retrial in patent case

hmmmmm

Why did it take Verizon so long to invoke patent privalages? Could it be they wanted Vonage to grow so they could recoup money on a concept patent?

Are Verizon doing anything with their Voip patents in terms of providing the service at a reduced price to the consumer? Not that I am aware of.

Are Verizon targeting other new Voip companies who are presumably infringing the same patents? Don't seem to be able to find info on that either, but then they are start-up companies and have no viable income yet.....

IMO, the courts need to look at the fact that if the patent holder does not develop and release a product based on the concept, they don't have a right to try and drive into the ground a company that ran with their concept, especially where that is years after they started.

Everyone's guilty of violating patents.

I agree with chris above, patents should not be held by corporations that seek only to profit by draining resources away from the true innovators.

Unfortunately non-IT people don't realize the ridiculousness of the patent situation.

A computer language/code is a form of expression which should be (at one point was) prohibited from being patented.

Those who program every day for a living solve problems as part of his/her job. It may or may not have been solved/patented before, but it makes more sense (is cheaper) to hire full time developers to solve the problem directly than it would be to hire a team to comprehensively research all the previous work and documents (patented or otherwise) to see whether or not any of it could useful, and then hire the developers anyways and then pay royalties on top. Once companies are slapped with an infringement case it may STILL be cheaper for them to reprogram around a patent than it would be to use it.

The overhead for software patents today is unmanageable even for large corporations. Luckily smaller entities are "allowed" to violate patents at least until they become successful.

You guys in the UK... what are you thinking moving to adapt software patents?? I'm around the world and it still keeps me up at night!

Obviousness is not the solution

Yes, obvious patents should not exist.

(I won't get into how to define "obviousness")

However I would still disagree in principal with a software patent on an algorithm that was non-obvious.

My reasoning is simple. Given a specific problem any skilled programmer should be able to develope and use an algorithm whether or not the algorithm was obvious in and of itself.

It is extremely naive to claim that without access to the inventor's research (the patent application), that the rest of the world would be unable to duplicate the algorithm. Most likely a developer could duplicate it in less than a week and even be willing to release it as open source.

Keeping in mind that the ultimate purpose for a patent is to benefit the public by providing access to the inventor's research. Given that this research is no longer all that valuable especially for software, patents no longer seem necessary or appropriate.

In recent decades the purpose of patents has shifted away from "public benefit" and towards "protecting the inventor", in which case software patents could still be useful (to the detriment of the public).

Not Knowing is Half the Battle

You know what's really bad? The more software patents you know about, valid or not, the more liable you can be held for infringing them in your programs. Legally speaking, your programmers should be as unaware of existing patents as possible.

At least in America.

You know what's worse? Software is about standards of communication and interface, and being able to restrict who uses it, so there's very little money in 'innovating' software. In fact, it's the only technology where we've gone BACKWARDS and are only now revisiting ideas we had in the 60's. Hell, we've had to bring obsolete computers out of cold storage to fight some of these patent suits:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?alias=theres-history-and-money&chanID=sa025&modsrc=reuters

As a skilled programmer, I want to make money using my ability. But between the people willing to borrow my ideas for free, and the people willing to sue me into oblivion, I'm starting to wonder how.