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The inventor who claims to have developed the first PDA (personal digital assistant) filed a slew of lawsuits Monday, including an action accusing Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and iPhone partner AT&T (NYSE: T) of infringing on his patents with the device's much-heralded Visual Voicemail feature.
Klausner Technologies is seeking both damages and future royalties that it estimates amount to as much as US$360 million.
Klausner describes its founder, Judah Klausner, as inventor of the PDA and electronic organizer. An earlier patent of Klausner's was among the technology in Apple's short-lived Newton PDA, but that technology had been licensed by Sharp, the outside company Apple used to manufacture the Newton.
Similar Action
Separately, Klausner took similar action against Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSK), Cablevision and eBay's (Nasdaq: EBAY) Skype for similar infringement, seeking a total of $300 million from those defendants. The firm filed the suit in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas -- a favorite venue of many patent plaintiffs because cases move relatively quickly.
At issue are two patents that Klausner claims to have already successfully licensed to other third parties, including AOL and Vonage.
"We have litigated this patent successfully on two prior occasions," said Greg Dovel, an attorney with Dovel & Luner, the firm representing Klausner Technologies. "With the signing of each new licensee, we continue to receive further confirmation of the strength of our visual voice mail patents."
Visual Voicemail is considered one of the more innovative features of the iPhone, which Apple launched to much fanfare and breathless anticipation in June. The feature -- which is highlighted in one of Apple's television commercials for the iPhone -- enables users to select which voice mails they want to listen to from a text list, eliminating the need to listen to messages in the order they are received.
Neither Apple nor AT&T would comment on the lawsuit.
Licenses Already
The two patents in question are numbers 5,572,576 and 5,283,818, both titled "Telephone answering device linking displayed data with recorded audio message." The patents were filed for in 1992 and issued in 1994 and 1995.
Klausner has already prompted Vonage and Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) AOL to license the technology for their voice mail services. The AOL agreement came only after Klausner sued AOL, seeking $200 million; Vonage settled with the firm after being hit with an action seeking $180 million in early 2006.
The suit claims the iPhone violates Klausner's intellectual property rights by allowing the user to selectively retrieve voice messages via the iPhone's inbox display.
"Given that a number of large companies have settled with Klausner and it doesn't look like any have gone to trial, I would venture to say that their patent is likely strong and the prospects of winning are good," Mitchell Weinstein, head of the intellectual property practice at Levenfeld Pearlstein in Chicago, told MacNewsWorld. "As such, companies like Apple and AT&T would likely drag this out for a bit to get some discovery too, and then ante up."
The fact that the disputed technology represents one of the more important innovations of the iPhone -- Visual Voicemail has been cited in many of the positive reviews of the device and Apple itself called it "one of the greatest advances in the history of mankind" when it debuted the iPhone early this year -- may also help motivate a settlement.
"I believe that the feature itself is so fundamental to the iPhone that Apple and AT&T would not want to risk possibly losing that functionality, which could also dampen Apple's future prospects for the phone," Weinstein added.
Option Defense
The fact that Klausner has won other licenses after filing patent may or may not be meaningful in this case, said Dan Venglarik, a patent law expert with Munck Butrus in Dallas and Marshall, Texas -- the home of the Eastern District court.
Klausner's position might be even stronger if it had secured the licenses without resorting to legal action. Meanwhile, for Apple, AT&T and the others, there may still be plenty of options for defending the claims.
"From the infringement side, unless they're doing the exact same thing with the patent, there are ways to argue that the use is different and protected," Venglarik told MacNewsWorld.
Separately, Apple got good news on another legal front Tuesday, with a German court upholding the legality of the device maker's exclusivity agreement with T-Mobile to carry the iPhone in the German market. Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) had asked a court to rule the agreement illegal, a move that could have opened the phone up to other carriers and threatened the financial model Apple is using to sell the device.
