Verizon Sues Cox Over Eight Phone Patents

VERIZON SUES COX OVER EIGHT PHONE PATENTS
[SOURCE: Multichannel News, AUTHOR: Todd Spangler]
Verizon, after winning a patent-infringement decision against Vonage Holdings last year, has trained its legal guns on cable's phone services with a similar lawsuit against Cox Communications. The telephone company's suit, filed Jan. 11 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleges Cox infringes eight patents related to delivering phone service over data communications networks. Verizon seeks unspecified monetary damages and wants Cox to be blocked from using the patents in the future. The eight patents Verizon cited in the Cox suit include the two Vonage was found to have infringed: U.S. Patent No. 6,104,711, for an "Enhanced Internet domain name server" to translate information from a public, packet-based network; and 6,282,574, "Method, server and telecommunications system for name translation on a conditional basis and/or to a telephone number," which is an extension of the earlier patent. Verizon's other claims against Cox concerned patents covering quality of service for a communications session, enhanced signaling, network session management, and inter-carrier signaling for connectivity between packet-based and circuit-switched networks.
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