Vonage and Verizon Battle it Out.
As is well known, Verizon filed a lawsuit against Vonage on June 19, 2006. To many people, news of this lawsuit wasn’t too shocking since Vonage is the number 1 digital phone service right now. Some feel that Verizon attacked mainly because Vonage is one of their leading competitors in VoIP. The charge was the Vonage had infringed on several of Verizon’s patents related to voice over internet phone services. With this accusation, Vonage responded that “its services have been developed with its own technology and technology licensed from third parties.” With this said, Vonage responded that they would defend themselves against the lawsuit. On 8 March 2007, the jury found Vonage guilty of infringing 3 of Verizon’s patents out the the original 7 that were at debate. They were ordered to pay $58 million dollars to Verizon and also a 5.5% loyalty rate of every sale to a Vonage customer. On April 6th a judge issued an injunction to ban Vonage to ban Vonage from signing up new customers, but shortly after on the April 24th, The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington D.C. retracted that injunction giving Vonage a permanent stay on the VoIP market. Reading about the lawsuit in the newspaper, one man said, “Is it really surprising that 2 companies doing the same thing would use similar technology. I don’t think the first guy to put ice cream in a cone sued the second who did the same. Can you really patent stuff like call waiting? It’s just a new spin on old technology.” Even with all the cloudy weather, Vonage is still doing very well and signing up many new subscribers every day. After all is said and done, Vonage still is number 1.