When I saw the TechCrunch headline ‘Patent Lawsuit Filed Against Skype Same Day Microsoft Deal Was Announced’ I right away thought of the different Joltid lawsuits filed by co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who own the P2P technology licensed by Skype. But surely, Microsoft, which acquired Skype would have produced their due diligence prior to paying out $ 8.5 billion for Skype. It turns out that it’s not JoltId’s Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis suing.
According to Techcrunch:
The case is Via Vadis Vs. Skype and was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia. Via Vadis is a Luxembourg-based organization with a license to the patents in question: U.S. Patent No. 7904680: &ldquoData access management method as nicely as a method for data access and data&rdquo and U.S. Reissue Patent RE40,521 of the same name. (The inventor of both is Thomas Binzinger, and the assignee is AC Technologies).
Both patents describe data management systems which break up files for redundancy and distribute them across different &ldquostorage units.&rdquo The lawsuit claims the patents cover the very same technologies Skype uses for its &ldquosupernodes&rdquo&mdashwhich function as fallback peers in Skype&rsquos peer-to-peer technology. The very first patent was issued on March 8, 2011, and the application goes back to July 23, 2005.
Techcrunch explains the lawsuit is from a corporation that issued a patent application back on July 23, 2005, although Skype had a working P2P with supernode architecture back in 2003. Appears like clear prior art to me. Skype clearly has the technology ahead of the 2005 application by two years!
If I may borrow Willy Wonka, “It is all there, black and white, clear as crystal! You stole Skype’s fizzy P2P supernodes! You bumped into the bandwidth ceiling which now has to be optimized and QoS’ed, so you get nothing! You lose! Excellent day, sir!”
Or if you prefer the original non-remix:
Tags: janus fris, joltid, microsoft, niklas zeenstrom, patent troll, skype, willy wonka
Related tags: lawsuit filed, niklas ennstrom, patent lawsuit, filed skype, janus friis, skype
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