Vonage loses appeal, now owes Verizon $117.5 million
By Conrad Quilty-Harper 
posted November 17th 2007 3:30PM
posted November 17th 2007 3:30PM
A follow-up to our earlier story regarding Verizon's patent lawsuit against Vonage: the latter company has lost its appeal against the former, and is now looking at having to pay the full $117.5 million settlement, plus $2.5 million to charity. It's been a bad few days for Vonage indeed, with the company's shares dropping 87 percent since IPO, and a tenth of its workforce out of a job. When you've hit rock bottom, the only way is up, right?[Via Slashdot]
What's Verizon going to do when Vonage files on them and the trustee sells Vonage's assets to a third party foreign corp?
"hey Verizon, try to enforce those patents in Bangalore..."
Not again! I always buy some of their stock in hope they won't get into another lawsuit. I'm going to assume some miracle will happen and they'll rise up.
SO can I sue Verizon for removing my $20 a month unlimited local and long distance telephone service if Vonage goes under and the do not offer a similar service?
I mean Verizon would in effect force me to pay more money for an inferior service and actually deny me service since they do not offer VOIP in Cleveland.
I know patent attorneys and some are behind the copyrights of everything and some are very against it believeing that today about 70% of patent filings shouldn't be granted on the basis that they are to vague and almost to the point of common knowledge.
The patent system is broken and no company should be allowed to patent an idea just to keep the competition from bringing out a superior product. A simple rule would be that you must bring or attempt to bring a patent granted product to market within 5 years or it becomes public property. If you can't produce an idea in 5 years then it should be given to someone who can. To protect inventors the filer still retails the intellectual property rights and is entitled to 5% of all revenue. Patent system fixed.