VoIP Patent Questions

A friend of mine saw yesterday's post about the bleak prospects for Vonage, and how one factor contributing to the uncertainty surrounding the company's future is potential for patent infringement.  Vonage has already paid over $240M to settle patent infringement claims from AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint Nextel. 

My friend proceeded to ask me about a jillion questions about VoIP patents, more than I can possibly answer in one post, and some of which I probably can't answer at all.  See, I am an inventor named on 18 patents, several of them in the VoIP space, but I'm not a patent lawyer, so I'm not really qualified to answer some of the questions.  I'll do my best, though.

I've adapted my friend's questions and added a few of my own here, and will commit to starting to answer some of these questions as best I can in a series of posts over time.  Drumroll, please....the questions:

1. Why is Vonage the target of all of these patent lawsuits?  Aren't there other VoIP infringers?
2. Don't other companies have VoIP patents, too, not just Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint?
3. Was Vonage really infringing, or did they just have inferior legal representation?
4. How broad are the patents that Vonage supposedly infringed?  Would any VoIP application also infringe?
5. Why haven't Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint gone after other infringers?  Are they allowed to be selective about who they target?
6. Why aren't VoIP software and equipment manufacturers also being targeted with VoIP patent lawsuits?
7. Is it now impossible for an independent VoIP service provider to make a go of it?  Can any VoIP service provider survive?
8. Some specific questions about Level 3 Communications:
   a) Would LVLT VoIP patents qualify as prior art and thus negate the Verizon, ATT, and Sprint suits?
   b) What keeps LVLT from coming to Vonage's defense... are LVLT's patents not strong enough?
   c) Is the LVLT Voice Termination business in jeopardy because of these patent wars?

I'm sure there are other questions that can be asked that are just as interesting as these, so bring 'em on! 

Meanwhile, here is just a little bit of background, just to get started, which might shed a little light on why some of the above questions may be hard to answer. 

I did some searching of online patent databases on a few key VoIP phrases, just to see how many patents mention these phrases, and here is what I came up with:

Phrase	Patent Count
Voice Over Internet Protocol	525
Internet Telephony	548
Packet Voice	476

Of course, many of the patents that mention "voice over internet protocol" might also mention "internet telephony", so I am sure theere is quite a bit of double-counting in the table above.  But I think it is safe to say that there are at least 600, and probably a lot more, patents that explicitly say something about VoIP or packet voice applications. 

The earliest patent in the above table is a Stanford University patent that was filed in 1981, patent number 4,503,533, and the patent specification explicity discussed the performance of packet voice applications on a certain kind of network design.   So, the fundamental idea of using packet networks for interactive voice conversations has been around for a long time.  Internet founder Vint Cerf once told me that they were thinking about using voice applications on packet networks way back in his DARPA days, which I think was as early as 1969.  Every little packet voice improvement, though, is patentable, and that's how we ended up where we are today.  More to come.