The Flat Planet and a Phone !

In the wake of Daniel Berniger’s remarks which I brought below, Jeff Pulver has some interesting remarks

Verizon’s patent claims (listed below), causing Vonage so much trouble, describe the general process of name translation implemented by FWD during the Autumn of 1995 and every VoIP service through the present….

…..The IRC server’s reply of a “numeric Internet Protocol address” to the calling device (i.e. calling party’s PC running Internet Phone) involved a conditional analysis in order to match the request to the appropriate destination FWD server. In other words, the IRC server operated in FWD’s architecture in the manner described in the ‘711 name translation patent two years before Verizon’s application.I could have applied for a patent on the name translation function in October 1995, but I viewed the not inconsequential cost of the FWD project as a contribution to the public domain. I even published a book “The Internet Telephone Toolkit” with a detailed description of FWD written in January 1996, two months before Eric Voit filed the patent application for Verizon. Nothing in the description section of Verizon’s patent would surprise members of the IPhone email discussion list I managed, yet the prior art disclosure does not reference FWD or the IPhone mailing list.

In November 1996, I gave a presentation to the VoIP Forum in Dallas. The meeting included participation from Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Nokia, Motorola, and Vocaltec for the purpose of making ITU H.323 the basis for a VoIP open standard. How do these companies feel about the Verizon’s assertion it owns the idea of name translation? How did Verizon accomplish this when the notion of name translation in H.323 traces back to the original ITU working group in 1993?

It seems something must have gone wrong somewhere for an asset of the public domain to end up in a patent. .

Boy, we are lucky no one tried to patent the Internet!