[Asterisk-Dev] Patent lawyers?

[Mike M]

On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 07:26:32PM -0500, Brian West wrote:
> 
> These patents are a bit broad if you ask me.. they are suing  
> callwave.  

Well callwave is playing the same game.

 SANTA BARBARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 24, 2005--CallWave, Inc.
 (Nasdaq:CALL), a leading provider of VoIP enhanced services, today
 announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded the company
 patent number 6,879,677. The new patent, titled "Methods and Systems
 for Telephony Call Completion," describes the method of notifying a
 mobile phone user when a previously unavailable or busy line that they
 have called becomes available. The notification is in the form of a
 text message sent to the mobile phone user when CallWave software
 detects that the called party's line is no longer busy.

The USPTO is notorius for issuing patents for this kind of stuff.  I guess
you could get an improvement patent if you filed for the same invention
with the modification that it didn't work on Tuesdays.  A text message
is not the same as an email or a call-back - no - of course it's not :).
Most of these software patents boil down to one thing: 
if (condition) do_action;

The rules of the game are this: if you have a patent then you also
need to defend it, because if you don't, you loose the patent
protection.  Sometimes the intent includes making  the
opponent spend money on legal fees instead of marketing.  At $400/hour,
patent litigation is a high stakes game where only the house wins.
Avoid litigation.

Don't bother trying to invalidate a patent.  It rarely works and it's
expensive. Instead, spend time looking for the weak spots in the
patents.  In the example above, it may be possible to detect a free line
and send an email.  The client's email is rigged to forward to SMS.  Two
separate and independent systems each doing unpatented things.  Taken
together they do the patented function and the patent claims miss
that possibility (perhaps, I have not read the patent).

If you are not going to patent your ideas, then put them into the public
domain. Sourceforge is a good place for that.

IANAL but I am listed on 3 patents, I've worked on patent alternative
technology teams, and I've put technology into the public domain - in
that order.

Good Luck,
-- 
Mike