\n You may recall stories involving a small patent holding firm called Klausner Technologies, which claims to hold patents on the concept of “visual voicemail.” It seems to have interpreted these patents pretty broadly to the point that it considers anyone who offers any graphical interface to voicemail as infringing. Over the years, that’s meant lawsuits against AOL<\/a>, Vonage<\/a>, Apple<\/a>, eBay, AT&T<\/a> and others. Apparently, suing one by one was too much trouble, because Klausner has now sued another bunch of companies including Google, Verizon and Embarq<\/a>. Of course, the company is playing up the fact that all those other companies it sued settled, but we’ve seen that game<\/a> before. There’s not much new here as this scenario is all too common. We have a company with an overly broad patent on a concept that was a natural obvious progression of the art, suing pretty much every company that actually innovates, thus making actual innovation more expensive.<\/p>\n <sigh><\/p>\n It isn’t that I don’t like patents… it is simply that a patent without the innovation required to make it a useful product or service should have NO CASH VALUE.<\/p>\n A patent of this kind is simply a documented idea. Ideas are great… executed ideas are better… ideas which generate revenue are a business. When your business becomes owning (broad, vague and easily malleable) ideas and suing people for using those ideas in a business you are simply a parasite.<\/p>\n You generate no value – you wait for others to generate value and then leech some off because they “used your idea”. The fun part is, they don’t even have to really use your idea<\/span><\/em>… they just have to come close enough to some overly broad idea you wrote down 5 years ago to allow you to sue them. If it is a big company, and you make your claim reasonably valid and for a reasonable dollar amount… they’ll just pay you off to avoid the court costs.<\/p>\n Congratulations – you’ve added nothing to the world and made everyone else’s job harder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From Techdirt today: You may recall stories involving a small patent holding firm called Klausner Technologies, which claims to hold patents on the concept of “visual voicemail.” It seems to have interpreted these patents pretty broadly to the point that it considers anyone who offers any graphical interface to voicemail as infringing. Over the years,… Continue reading Klausner Continues To Sue Everyone Over Visual Voicemail Patent<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12,18,25],"tags":[174,205,298],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} [From Klausner Continues To Sue Everyone Over Visual Voicemail Patent<\/cite><\/a>]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n