Just imagine you work at the International Trade Commission in the US for a moment and consider the complaint that Verizon has filed this week with the ITC over Cablevision using patented set top features.
Verizon claims it has patents in set tops, and focuses on five technologies, which although it doesn’t exactly list them, it mentions the ability to download videos or provide functions such as games, local weather and social networking. So there’s four separate functions.
Your job involves you checking if there is any prior art involved here, so ask yourself, is the FiOS TV service the first place in the world where you can download videos? If we remember rightly we first saw a downloaded video over the internet in 1992. What about to a set top? Well there is Akimbo that did it to a DVR class set top in 2004, before FiOS was even a public concept and before anyone ever offered set tops with Verizon.
What about functions such as games? Well Comcast offers games to its set tops, and has done so since 2004, when it first used the Moxi set top from Digeo, owned indirectly by Paul Allen, who also indirectly owns Charter, a cable operator like Cablevision.
We can’t track down when local weather channels were launched, because it was so long ago, but we suspect that the local broadcasters would own the patent on that, going back into the 1950s, which would make it exhausted.
Finally links to social networking, well they are on every phone, and every set top, do we really believe that a) Verizon owns such patents or that b) if it does, it SHOULD have been granted such patents.
Certainly Microsoft, which supposedly built the FiOS system (it mostly didn’t and partly copied the cable TV technique for splitting channels into separate spectrum on the cable, and a lot of work was done by Verizon itself) showed that kind of connection as a demonstration of what was possible, back in 2004, before Verizon ever wrote a line of set top code.
You might also ask yourself if this is actually an intellectual property dispute, given that the two companies occupy much of the same geographical territory, or is it really a way of taking normal business rivalry into the courtroom to gain an edge.
If the US Patent and Trademark Office has genuinely allowed Verizon to file these kinds of patents, they would likely only stand up on things like VoIP, where the company successfully sued Vonage citing ways of connecting VoIP to the public switched network.
Cablevision certainly does connect VoIP to the public switched system, but somehow Verizon ignored that approach, and instead seems intent on starting a US wide war over just who owns the intellectual property in set tops.
Verizon’s remedy is to have all the Cablevision set tops switched off, and we can read between the lines that it will point out that it is spending $23 billion of its own funds to build out fiber just so that the US can have lovely high speed broadband, and isn’t that just what the nice Mr Obama wants?
So you judge, as if you were the ITC commissioner in charge. What do you think is the most likely outcome. Would it be to a) Shut down Cablevision infringing set tops and force a huge licensing fee on the cableco to use Verizon technologies b) leave the status quo and dismiss the case or c) see that patent royalties are charged at the device rather than operator level and leave it to the set top makers or d) fire people at the USPTO who issued such obvious and prior art based patents or e) come down hard on Verizon for wasting everyone’s time and trying to start a set top technology war.
What we all need in our home is a device which accepts broadband and can recognize multiple modulations of broadband signals, can interpret and decode every major video, image and audio codec, can support multiple business models and rules, and manage multiple screens, multiple forms of storage and peripherals and do it securely with DRM technologies which do not get in the way to the point of invisibility. Oh yeah and it can communicate with multiple radio technologies from behaving as a femtocell or wi-fi access point to negotiating Bluetooth or 60 GHz technologies.
Such a box would be a massive conglomeration of royalties and is pretty much where Broadcom’s entire R&D budget is taking it. Just how would ANY of those technologies BELONG to a recalcitrant telco that decided never to travel in the vanguard of innovation and instead waited until half the world had left its broadband technology base behind before spending $23 billion to merely catch up.
You can see that if it was us, on the evidence so far presented, we’d be pushing option e).
So we don’t think that the ITC will allow Verizon to put the complaint on the accelerated fast track. Nor do we think that compensation will travel in the direction of Verizon.
Verizon would be better advised to spend marketing dollars, instead of legal dollars, trying to prevent US homes deserting its fixed lines for Cablevision.