By Sean Buckley and Samantha Bookman
Chalk up a win for patent holders: A total of eight service providers, including Alcatel-Lucent USA (NYSE: ALU) and EarthLink (Nasdaq: ELNK), on Thursday entered into separate patent agreements with visual voicemail provider Klausner Technologies for its consumer and enterprise visual voicemail products, bringing an end to separate infringement lawsuits filed against them by Klausner in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
The other six providers settling yesterday were AireSpring, Bandwidth.com, J2 Global Communications (Nasdaq: JCOM), MetroPCS (NYSE: PCS), Nextiva and Samsung (OTC: SSNLF.PK).
The company founded by Judah Klausner, who helped invent the PDA and electronic organizer, originally brought suit against 12 service providers, asserting infringement against some of the 25 patents it owns. Klausner has tangled with several big names in telecommunications over the years regarding patent infringement, including Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and AT&T (NYSE: T), a ComputerWorld article details.
Three of the 12 defendants yesterday did not settle: Toshiba America, Primus Telecommunications, and PAETEC--recently acquired by Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN), which is also defending a patent infringement lawsuit Klausner filed last week.
The eight new licensees bring the total of companies now licensing Klausner's voicemail patents to more than 50. Other licensees of the patents include a number of the Tier 1 U.S. and European wireless operators, handset manufacturers, VoIP, cable operators, enterprise voicemail providers and other providers of Visual Voicemail services.
Separately, Samsung Electronics has signed a license agreement under the Klausner U.S. and international Visual Voicemail patents. These patents enable consumers to view, prioritize, and select voice messages from their mobile phones or via the Internet.
For more:
- SpeechTechMag has this article
- see this release
- and Alcatel-Lucent's announcement
Related articles:
Windstream becomes Klausner's latest visual voice mail patent target
Klausner files suit against Cisco, Avaya over voicemail patent
Verizon looks to stop voicemail lawsuit