Visual Voicemail Patent Settlement

Someone (and his lawyers) just became incredibly wealthy.

I am surprised that Apple and/or AT&T couldn't find a way around this mess be changing something small in the way they implement visual voicemail. Seems odd that Apple would not have known there was a patent for this feature. Hmm.

I am surprised that Apple and/or AT&T couldn't find a way around this mess be changing something small in the way they implement visual voicemail. Seems odd that Apple would not have known there was a patent for this feature. Hmm.

The nature of patents is such that essentially everything is patented with a wide swath claim, that could be fought in court unless the court finds that the specific is covered by the general. Claimants file in jurisdictions where that is always found.

It is a shake down. Get over it.

Have you ever wondered why Apple patent claims have so many (hundreds) of subclaims?

They patent EVERYTHING they can.

Plenty of people came before them. Apple innovates, deploys, and waits to be sued.

Hence why they have a cash hoard.

Rocketman

Exactly. Sometimes it is cheaper financially to settle than it is to fight it over & over again in court.

Not to mention the bad publicity garnered from litigation.

My initial reaction tends to be to assume that a small company is gold-digging and blackmailing a deep-pockets company by claiming prior art, so they settle to get rid of the pest. But I know that sometimes there are valid claims for what later seems obvious. Perhaps Klausner deserved its money for the idea to give you a visible signal when you have a voice message. I dunno. :shrug:

The nature of patents is such that essentially everything is patented with a wide swath claim, that could be fought in court unless the court finds that the specific is covered by the general. Claimants file in jurisdictions where that is always found.

It is a shake down. Get over it.

Have you ever wondered why Apple patent claims have so many (hundreds) of subclaims?

They patent EVERYTHING they can.

Plenty of people came before them. Apple innovates, deploys, and waits to be sued.

Hence why they have a cash hoard.

Rocketman

If you are enabled and show a written description for a technology, then you get a claim to it -- assuming it hasn't already been disclosed. It's relatively easy to describe what you want and show that it would reasonably work in the engineering fields....

My initial reaction tends to be to assume that a small company is gold-digging and blackmailing a deep-pockets company by claiming prior art, so they settle to get rid of the pest. But I know that sometimes there are valid claims for what later seems obvious. Perhaps Klausner deserved its money for the idea to give you a visible signal when you have a voice message. I dunno. :shrug:

I felt like the latter half of your message in this case. I mean, it's a good idea and the likelihood that Apple were the first to come up with it isn't great, so that they have to pay their dues to the company that came up with it first seems about right to me.

Interesting that Apple owns the patent now. And here I thought it would become the new standard for voicemails in the future, seems like Apple is going to keep it to themselves.. If so, I don't like this at all...

They don't own the patent. They bought a license to be able to use the technology. Klausner is free to license it to anyone else.