Apple Sued For $360 Million Over iPhone's Voicemail

Jason Mick
December 4, 2007 10:02 AM



Klausner Technologies seeks to milk money out of Apple, and in a seperate suit out of Comcast, Cablevision Systems, and eBay's Skype

What is lauded by many users as one of the iPhone's hottest features has just landed the electronics giant in some hot legal waters.

TIME magazine's invention of the year, just landed one of the bigger patent infringement suits of the year. Klausner Technologies has filed suit against Apple claiming the giant infringed on its patent for visual voicemail, and is seeking $360M in compensation and damages.

Klausner holds U.S. patents 5,572,576 and 5,283,818. The patents basically describe a system that allows for visual retrieval and sorting of voicemail via a display. The patents certainly sound like they would cover any visual voicemail setup, which likely is making Apple pretty nervous.

The plaintiff cites Apple's states that visual voicemail is "one of the greatest advances in the history of mankind ... without question" and yet is shorting the inventor on royalties.

Various other companies have already paid Klausner Technologies to license these patents, including Time Warner's AOL, which features the technology in its AOL Voicemail service. Vonage also pays to use the technology in its Voicemail Plus service.

Apple and AT&T refused to make immediate comments on the lawsuit.

The suit was filed by California law firm of Dovel & Luner in a federal court in the Eastern District of Texas. Klausner also attacked Comcast's Digital Voice Voicemail, Cablevision Systems' Optimum Voicemail, and Ebay's Skype, filing a separate lawsuit in the same court, on the same day. The second suit cites infringement on the same patents and seeks from the group of infringers a barely lighter $300M.

Klausner Technologies is an avid patent seeker, and was founded by Judah Klausner who invented and patented the PDA and electronic organizer. Judah owns the legendary U.S. patent 4,117,542 which covers these devices. He licensed his PDA patent under an OEM license to Apple so that Apple could develop its Newton PDA, which became the archetype for many PDAs to come. Klausner's new company has oft been compared to licenser NTP for its aggressive patent mongering -- though in Klausner's defense, he has singularly come up with a large portion of the ideas.

Now Apple, who once enjoyed happy times with Klausner celebrating Newtons in the 90s, faces its former friend as an enemy in court. Unfortunately for Apple, Klausner is just one legal enemy of its much maligned iPhone. Apple is facing class action suits for its iBricking and "monopolistic behavior", suits over the iPhones battery, an environmental lawsuit from activist organization Greenpeace, and complaints of iFires.

Hopefully Apple's astronomical iPhone sales and energetic growth can keep pace with its mounting legal bills.


DailyTech - Apple Sued For $360 Million Over iPhone's Voicemail

 

and now that it's public about the new 3G iPhone i'd say that obviously Apple is favoring GSM mostly because from the looks of it CDMA will phase out in the next decade or so..........Sprint has chosen WiMax..........Verizon has chosen LTE.................AT&T and T-Mobile have chosen UMTS/HSDPA

Apple making an investment in a CDMA iPhone would also be pointless until the carriers have completely opened up their networks because a key image of Apple is protability especially with their iPods........locked up CDMA networks could make this difficult

 

well of course it will be for data only at first because the speeds of WiMax aren't predictable enough and VoIP is unstable in a WiMax environment.........but the hope is that eventualy it will be strong enough to support voice and data together..........

 

yeah........the technology is very promising.........they have already done 4 way teleconferencing on it.......commercially set up in 4 metro areas.........but the amount of traffic regular voice data would entail is very high and the WiMax technology is not ready for that yet let alone the network that Sprint has as of now

 

havent heard too much about the battery life..........is it really that bad???

 

yeah i've heard that.........they patent something and they dont let it go but think about how the person who owns the patents is prolli making more money suing than setting up contracts to pay royalites.....lol.........but visual voicemail is used everywhere..........that person is gonna be sooooooo rich

 

i concur.........i'm sure there is a board for opinions elsewhere on the site

 

i like how the 7-poster is telling the 2,500+ poster to go post on other forums

 

it's still more than 7 though

 

yeah the sarcastic Merry Christmas wasn't very polite either

 

yes so anyway......the following (to start a list) use visual vmail

GrandCentral
AIM Phoneline
AT&T IPhone
Vonage and so much more