The Vonage Saga

I was recently discussing Vonage with someone...was Vonage just blatantly cavalier in violating all kinds of patented IP and then getting sued by all the tech majors, Verizon, AT&T and Sprint-Nextel? Or were the majors just ganging up on a smaller vendor and the broader VoIP technology landscape which has cannibalized much of their long distance revenue?

As with any "he said, she said" the truth is probably somewhere in between or somewhere completely different, but Daniel Beringer provides his perspective at GigaOm.

He says " Vonage lost because of the difficulty in finding the proper documentation of prior art 15 years after the fact." and concludes" A formal process of filing prior art to the public domain will protect an emerging infocom industry better than just depending on overworked patent examiners and applicants for prior art searches."

That is small consolation for Vonage investors who have seen much of the IPO proceeds drained away in legal fees and settlements. And for consumers who should have seen far more aggressive VoIP deployments than they have from the major telcos...as Mark Galloway commented on this post last year, patents are often used for defensive reasons, not to deliver innovation to consumers.