TMCnet News
Google Sued Over VoIPBy RICH TEHRANI
President & Group Editor-in-Chief Many months back I wrote an article on Rates Technology Inc.– A company with a patent portfolio currently being used to persuade VoIP equipment and service vendors to pay a fee in exchange for protection from a patent infringement lawsuit. I wasn’t sure if people would care about my article because there were few references to Rates Technology on the Internet. Since Rates Technology has been around for years I certainly wasn’t discovering them but it does seem I was the first to take the time to explain how the company works. Fast forward about eight months. Today I received an e-mail from Tom Keating telling me that Om Malik has linked to me in his blog regarding Rates Technology. I was pretty blown away as I thought I would never hear about this company again. It seems according to Om and an excellent article on SearchEngineWatch.com that Rates Technology is now suing Google for patent infringement. I figure if the company can go after the largest telecom companies in the world, Google shouldn’t be too big to tackle. As the pricing structure Rates Technology charges is based on tiers I imagine Google is in the highest one and as such has a massive amount to pay. I suppose the search giant thinks litigation may be the cheapest way to go on this one. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out as this case could have ramifications for the entire VoIP industry. ----- Rich Tehrani is President and Group Editor in Chief at TMC. In addition he is the Chairman of the world’s best attended VoIP event, Internet Telephony Conference & Expo. |