Christopher Herot's Weblog

Verizon vs. Vonage - Claim Construction

Thanks to Brough Turner, I have posted the claim construction for the recent patent case between Verizon and Vonage.  As I learned from my experience as an expert witness, claim construction is the painstaking process in which individual words of the claims of the patent are examined in the context of the specification of the patent in order to assign meanings to them, for example in this case deciding if "name" refers to the called party or to the called party's device.  Claim construction is a matter of law and is therefor decided by the a, whose decisions are rendered in the above-referenced document.  All the jury gets to decide is whether the claims (as so understood) are infringed by the defendant.  As Fred Goldstein has pointed out, the jury was not asked to decide if these patents are valid.  Good thing for Verizon, since the claims at issue are for looking up a name and returning an address, something that's been going on in the Internet at least since Paul Mockapetris invented of DNS in 1983.  I expect this will be in the courts for some time to come.

Verizon Services Corp. et al v. Vonage Holdings Corp. et al

Many people have written about the recently decided patent infringement case (1:06-cv-00682-CMH-BRP) Verizon brought against Vonage in the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
but no one has posted any details about which patents were infringed.  So here goes...

The jury found that Vonage had infringed on the following Verizon patents.

6,104,711 - claim 20

15. A method comprising:

receiving a name translation request at a server coupled to a public packet data network;

executing a conditional analysis in response to the name translation request;

if the conditional analysis produces a first result, translating a name included in the name translation request into a first destination address;

if the conditional analysis produces a second result, translating the name included in the name translation request into a second destination address; and

transmitting a response message containing the first or the second destination address to a calling device for use in establishing communication at least partially through the public packet data network.

20. A method as in claim 15; wherein:

the first and second destination address includes a numeric Internet Protocol address; and

the second destination address further includes information relating to call routing via a public switched telephone network.

6,282,574 - claim 27

26. A method comprising:

receiving a name translation request at a server coupled to a public packet data network;

translating a name included in the request into a destination telephone number associated with a name included in the request; and

transmitting a reply containing both the destination telephone number and a packet data network address of a telephone gateway coupled between the public packet data network and a telephone network through the public packet data network to a calling device.

27. A method as in claim 26, wherein the address is an Internet Protocol address.

6,359,880 - claims 1, 6, 7, and 8

1. A method comprising: registering a wireless telephone terminal in a localized wireless gateway system;

transmitting registration data identifying the gateway system from the localized  wireless gateway system to a home location register database through a public packet  data communication network;

receiving a request from a calling computer coupled to the public packet data communication network for a call to the wireless telephone terminal;

in response to the request, accessing the home location register database and obtaining a packet data address for the localized wireless gateway system;

using the address to set up a voice communication through the public packet data communication network and the localized wireless gateway system between the calling computer and the wireless telephone terminal.

6. A method as in claim 1, wherein the public packet data communication network is a packet switched network.

7. A method as in claim 6, wherein the packet switched network comprises a system of interlinked data networks using TCP/IP protocol.

8. A method as in claim 7, wherein the system of interlinked data networks comprises  the Internet.

Clint Ricker has a good analysis on his blog.