Small patent holding firm Klausner Technologies has sued HTC for infringing the patents on visual voicemail it says it holds, adding the phone maker to a long list of companies that have been attacked with the overly broad patent. Just as in the previous cases, it's not clear how this system actually helps anybody that's doing any actual innovation; the company with the patent, but which has never apparently done anything to actually bring it to market, gets to assess an innovation tax on companies doing the actual legwork. Meanwhile, the idea underlying the patent -- displaying voicemail info on a screen -- really isn't much more than a foreseeable progression of technology. So carry on, patent system, holding back innovation and misaligning incentives.

I was a bit disappointed earlier this week to see that Google had settled a patent infringement lawsuit filed against it by Judah Klausner. Klausner has been going around for years and years suing tons of companies, claiming that any sort of "visual voicemail" offering violates his patent. He's been quite successful getting big companies to settle, which suggests he probably sets his demands at a point just slightly cheaper than it would cost to fight him. It's difficult to see why the concept is even remotely patentable. I remember talking to people about similar ideas for ages. All it basically does is apply an email interface to voicemail. That's not anything special, and hardly "nonobvious to those skilled in the art."

But companies keep settling -- and it's obvious now why Google did so. Just days after the settlement, Google has announced its new Google Voice offering which (wouldn't you know it?) includes a visual voicemail component. These days, it seems like paying off patent hoarders even for ideas that plenty of folks came up with on their own, is just a "cost of doing business."

You may recall stories involving a small patent holding firm called Klausner Technologies, which claims to hold patents on the concept of "visual voicemail." It seems to have interpreted these patents pretty broadly to the point that it considers anyone who offers any graphical interface to voicemail as infringing. Over the years, that's meant lawsuits against AOL, Vonage, Apple, eBay, AT&T and others. Apparently, suing one by one was too much trouble, because Klausner has now sued another bunch of companies including Google, Verizon and Embarq. Of course, the company is playing up the fact that all those other companies it sued settled, but we've seen that game before. There's not much new here as this scenario is all too common. We have a company with an overly broad patent on a concept that was a natural obvious progression of the art, suing pretty much every company that actually innovates, thus making actual innovation more expensive.

The reason patent hoarding firms are often successful in getting companies to pay up has little to do with the quality of their patents, but the fact that fighting these lawsuits out in court is so very expensive and time consuming. It's often much easier and cheaper to just settle. Klausner Technologies has been very successful in getting companies to pay up for daring to use the concept of "visual voicemail." Klausner for years has basically claimed ownership to any sort of "visual" phone info, such as the time it sued AOL for daring to display caller ID info on your screen -- something that clearly no one would have ever thought of if not for Klausner's patent. AOL just settled rather than deal with the mess of fighting it. Ditto for a similar lawsuit against Vonage. The latest trio to settle up are Apple, eBay and AT&T. With Apple and AT&T the lawsuit was over the visual voicemail feature found on the iPhone -- guess all those patents Steve Jobs hyped up didn't protect it from patent lawsuits.

So now Klausner has even more money to go after others (Comcast and Cablevision are listed as targets) -- and it will use the fact that all these big name companies settled as "evidence" that its patents are valid, even if the only thing it really means is that companies did the math and realized it's cheaper to settle. Even the press is falling for this false claim. News.com notes that Apple, AT&T and eBay probably would have lost because AOL and Vonage licensed the patent. That's not at all true. Both companies settled because it was cheaper and easier, rather than due to any acknowledgment that the patents are valid. The fact that some firms settle have no bearing on whether or not other companies could have won in court.

When the iPhone was first announced, Steve Jobs proudly hyped up the 200 patents the company had filed around the various parts of the device. However, we were among those who wondered what the point of all those patents were -- as most of the concepts were widely known, and Apples real innovation was putting them all together in a nice usable package. And, if Steve Jobs thought that the announcement of those 200 patents would scare off patent infringement lawsuits, he was clearly mistaken. The iPhone has already been accused of patent infringement for the touchscreen and the virtual keyboard, and now Klausner Technologies has sued the company for its visual voicemail offering. If Klausner sounds familiar to you, that's because it's the company that sued both AOL and Vonage for daring to display voicemail information on a screen (yes, apparently that concept is patented). Vonage, of course, recently settled with Klausner, giving it the cash to take on a big fish like Apple. Considering Apple's notorious willingness to pay up when accused of patent infringement, even on the most ridiculous patents, this strategy probably makes sense for Klausner, but it's hard to see how it furthers the cause of innovation.

Just a few days after settling with Sprint over a patent dispute, Vonage has also settled a patent dispute with a small company called Klausner Technologies. It looks like Vonage is really trying to clear the decks of these pesky patent lawsuits -- which still seem rather petty and against the purpose of the patent system. However, it doesn't look like Vonage is anywhere close to settling in its other big patent lawsuit battle. Instead, it's asking the courts to rehear its patent case against Verizon. This really is a shame. While Vonage has faced a variety of struggles on the business front, it was the company that was able to bring VoIP to the consumer market in a way that no other company was willing to do. It's unfortunate that rather than being able to take the service and the company to the next level, it now has to spend so much time and money battling over patents. The technology behind VoIP was nothing special. People had talked about if for ages. What held back VoIP was having the bandwidth to support it and a convincing marketing campaign that showed how easy it was to switch to VoIP while making it seamless with an existing phone system. Vonage was the ones to innovate here -- and now they need to pay up over a bunch of bogus patents.