At a technical level, Microsoft NetMeeting was doing much the same thing as FaceTime is doing, only it was doing so back in about 1997, well before the ‘953 patent, and it was doing it on desktop computers connected by high-speed internet. NetMeeting was bundled with Internet Explorer 4, and then with Windows ME. It just didn’t turn out to be particularly economically practical as a mass-product. The main purpose of NetMeeting seems to have been to allow a Microsoft support tech, via the internet, to virtually stand behind the shoulder of a customer having computer problems, and show him how to do things. It had elaborate facilities for clicking the buttons of applications on the other party’s computer, and that kind of thing. NetMeeting was effectively designed mostly to meet the problems of a Microsoft support tech who had gotten very frustrated about talking customers through tasks on the telephone. There are some very funny stories from way back when about doing telephone support, especially with a certain type of authoritarian user who was very upset that the computer didn’t respect him the way a secretary did.

Ekiga, in the Linux distributions, tended to be much more conservative about the features it added, not feeling so much need to enable hand-holding by support techs.

Of course, you understand that people in the military were doing videoconferencing way, way back. I should think at least as far back as 1980. Military projects have a way of constituting prior art, because cost was no object, so they did everything years before anyone else could afford it. In about the year 1956, they had my father programming a video terminal.

What is different about FaceTime, compared to NetMeeting and Ekiga, is its use of WiFi. However, it is immediately obvious, given the existence of WiFi, to run various and sundry applications over Wi-Fi. See my discussion here:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110802/11494415363/patent-loving-court-strikes-again-cafc-orders-uspto-to-reconsider-ntp-patents-it-had-rejected.shtml#c34

Also see:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090312/1711214100.shtml#c334

The notion of protecting user interfaces with design patents is essentially a re-hash of the old visual copyright business, back around 1990. The courts rejected visual copyright, and, by the same reason, they would reject the use of design patents to cover user interfaces. As for ownership of interfaces, you might take a look at the letter I had published in the December 1990 issue of BYTE (p. 34). This was concerned with the ultimate ownership of user interfaces. I argued that the value of user interfaces consisted in the skills of the users. Perfectly good user interfaces were in the remainder bin for want of users. That said, the concept of peonage law applies to user interfaces, and the user interface rightfully belongs to the users. On the whole, the piece has stood up fairly well, given that I do not possess the second sight. The essence of a good user interface is that it is so obvious and/or grounded in prior usage (prior art) that you can use it by reflex– you don’t have to stop and think about what things mean. For a user interface, “original and unobvious” means bad and defective. By the same reasoning, server interfaces derive their value from the documents stored on the servers in question. If there is nothing on a server, the server is worthless, and so are its constituent parts.

The true points of novelty of FaceTime, and of smart-phone apps generally, are not so much technical, so much as they are a matter of marketing. The smartphone market is a very different market from traditional computer markets, involving different kinds of people, who do different kinds of things. That is simply not patentable.

I find smartphones rather alien. In my generation, you were an early adopter of computers if you were an engineer, or a writer, or something like that. Or, perhaps I should say, because you were an engineer or a writer. Computers fitted into a certain sort of lifestyle, based on careful workmanship and all. The computer replaced older tools such as the typewriter, or a set of mechanical drawing tools. The great advantage of a word processor over a typewriter was that it made revision and rewriting simple. You sat at a desk in a room of your own, surrounded by bookshelves, with the door closed so that people could not disturb you, and concentrated. I take it for granted that the right use of computers is to reduce the number of things which one has to physically chase after. I don’t feel the need for a smart-phone. I do feel the need for Amazon to have better robots, so that they can provide better service. When I go out for a walk, it’s for the sake of going out for a walk, and the last thing I want to do is to carry along a cellphone.Smartphones are being sold to people who are not like me, rather the reverse.