AppleInsider StaffApple and AT&T on Monday were hit with a hefty patent infringement lawsuit from Klausner Technologies, which charges the pair with treading on patented technology by offering Visual Voicemail service to iPhone customers.
Klausner is seeking damages and future royalties estimated at $360 million.
Owned by a group of private investors, the firm has successfully defended and then licensed the same patents to other industry heavyweights that provide visual voicemail services, including Time Warner’s AOL for its AOL Voicemail services and Vonage Holdings for its Vonage Voicemail Plus services.
In the latest suit, Klausner specifically alleges that the iPhone violates its intellectual property rights by allowing users to selectively retrieve voice messages via the iPhone’s inbox display.
"We have litigated this patent successfully on two prior occasions," said Greg Dovel of Dovel & Luner, counsel for Klausner. "With the signing of each new licensee, we continue to receive further confirmation of the strength of our visual voicemail patents."
Separately on Monday, Klausner also filed similar claims against Comcast Corporation, Cablevision Systems Corp. and eBay Inc.’s Skype with damages and future royalties estimated at $300 million.
In that case, Klausner’s alleges that Cablevision’s Optimum Voicemail, Comcast’s Digital Voice Voicemail and eBay’s Skype Voicemail each violate intellectual property rights by allowing users to selectively retrieve and listen to voice messages via message inbox displays.
Wesley Hilliard
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69 Comments
I'm curious about AT&T's non-iPhone visual voicemail services. I hadn't heard of them. If they already existed before the iPhone then that certainly would have given Apple reason to want to work with AT&T.
I'm curious about AT&T's non-iPhone visual voicemail services. I hadn't heard of them. If they already existed before the iPhone then that certainly would have given Apple reason to want to work with AT&T.
I believe the other "Visual Voicemail" might be non-related to cell phones, for example AT&T's VOIP phone systems (much as these guys are also suing cable companies over VOIP "visual voicemail").
It seems to me like the way to make it rich these days is invent something and patent it. You don't have to create it or produce it, you just have to know how to patent it. Then wait for someone else to make it and sue them.
All these stupid things I think up that I don't know how to make I'm just going to patent. Sooner or later someone will create it and I'll be rich.
ahahah i swear... we are undoing ourselves while the Asian manufacturers kick our collective dum-basses, laughing all the way to the tech bank.
To many greedy people in the world.