That’s a US patent and the lawsuit is Canadian, but I have to imagine they applied for a similar patent in Canada.
I hope they lose the case and their patent is invalidated. (Isn’t this system highly similar to how Napster messaging and AIM “direct connection” chats worked, before 2004?)
Anyway, here’s another US patent that could be relevant. Seems even weaker, though: “A method of displaying messages on handheld devices. The device displays messages in a scrollable viewport of vertically arranged fields. Date separators inserted into the vertically arranged list of messages to enable the user to associate the messages with a date. …”
This might be stupid/crazy, but might it make sense to have a DNS for phone numbers? Why not have 6464680751.cell resolve to a public IP address of my phone? If another phone wants to send it a text message or make a phone call, could it just use the variety of protocols on top of IP?
Yes, phone numbers are a legacy of the old telecom systems. SIP uses user@domain style URIs, and this can be mapped to a legacy number via ENUM, and vice versa.
4G cellular networks are all IP and use SIP for signalling. I doubt phones are publicly addresssable though, the telco probably NATs them.
I eagerly await a number-free, VoIP-enabled, IPv6 world.
I hope they lose the case and their patent is invalidated. (Isn’t this system highly similar to how Napster messaging and AIM “direct connection” chats worked, before 2004?)
Anyway, here’s another US patent that could be relevant. Seems even weaker, though: “A method of displaying messages on handheld devices. The device displays messages in a scrollable viewport of vertically arranged fields. Date separators inserted into the vertically arranged list of messages to enable the user to associate the messages with a date. …”
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=6lKrAAAAEBAJ