Hosted VoIP

Halloween isn’t the only day of the year that the patent trolls are creeping about.

That’s why, if you’re dealing in VoIP technology, it’s critically important to continuously cover your ... ummm … intellectual property so that those nasty little buggers don’t come along and steal it from right out under you. After all, they can do it by cryptically-interpreting the vaguest and most ambiguous phrases and terminology found in U.S. patent law (even I’m getting nervous, writing this article). Just go and ask the executives at Vonage.

One VoIP technology firm that’s covering its … ummm … bases is i2Telecom (News - Alert) International, Inc. The company -- maker of the popular VoiceStick USB device, which turns your PC into a VoIP telephone -- announced today that it has retained one of the world’s leading intellectual property law firms, Vinson & Elkins LLP (V&E), to investigate possible patent infringements regarding its recently allowed patent application on portable access VoIP technology.

According to a company news release, i2Telecom was notified in September that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO") had granted a Notice of Allowance for its pending patents for the technology which powers the VoiceStick, dubbed “Portable VoIP Service Access Module” (“VSAM”). The company hopes the patent will be issued before the end of 2007.

Shortly after i2Telecom filed for the patent in October 2004, TMC’s (News - Alert) Internet Telephony Magazine named VoiceStick its "Product of the Year." Not only does this revolutionary device let you turn your computer into a VoIP phone, it also lets a subscriber turn their cell phone into a “world phone” (gee, can we use that term? I guess if it is lower cased …) via a local direct inward dial ("DID") number that they can take with them wherever they go.

According to the news release, the company has asked lawyers at Vinson & Elkins to “undertake immediate efforts to identify possible violations of its intellectual property rights and, if necessary, to initiate legal proceedings against suspected infringers.”

Leading the inquiry is V&E’s David Weaver, a former aerospace engineer at NASA who is “considered one of the nation’s leading trial lawyers” in the area of copyright and patent infringement.

If you want to read the substantive portions of the patent, check out the news release.

For additional information about i2Telecom, visit www.i2telecom.com -- or visit www.voicestick.com.

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Patrick Barnard is Associate Editor for Customer Interaction Solutions magazine and Assignment Editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.