Verizon loses in jury trial against Cox, two patent claims invalidated

by Scott M. Fulton, III

In a costly loss in US District Court in Alexandria yesterday, a jury found all of Verizon's claims that Cox Communications infringed upon its VoIP-related patents to be without basis, and even invalidated two of eight patent claims.

Back in January, Verizon filed a patent infringement suit against a Virginia division of Cox Communications, which was establishing VoIP service in that state. It was a boilerplate case that asserted its claims to eight US patents in the field of Internet-related voice telephony. Those patents were mostly acquired by Verizon on account of mergers and acquisitions, having been originally issued to such one-time giants as MCI and Bell Atlantic.

Two such patents issued to Bell Atlantic in 1997 were both for an "enhanced name translation server." Imagine a DNS server that was capable of being directed arbitrarily to resolve a domain name resolution request with an alternate IP address. Now imagine if that alternative could be a telephone number, or something which linked to the public service telephone network at that number. That's the basis of these two patent claims.

Yesterday, with a series of checkmarks on a court tally, the jury declared those two Verizon claims invalid. This in a case in which Verizon was the plaintiff.

A Verizon spokesperson's statement yesterday did not specifically indicate whether it would appeal the jury's verdict, though it did reiterate the company's belief that its patents were infringed. The jury's decision does not nullify those patents, though the invalidation of those two claims could be strikes against Verizon should Cox find itself defending against an appeal in a higher court.

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