Claims to own patents on 'multimedia' voicemails

A patent holding company that fits the description of a patent troll has filed a lawsuit against Apple's iPhone and iPad, claiming that the company's implementation of voicemail violates two "multimedia voicemail" patents that originally belonged to a Florida modem maker called Paradyne, GigaOM reports. The patent refers to the ability to listen to voicemail messages along with viewing associated data (for example an image).

The two patents were awarded in 1998 and 2001 to Paradyne, a modem maker that was bought out by broadband company Zphone in 2006. How Brandywine obtained the patents has not been made clear, nor how exactly they relate to Apple's implementation of voicemail or Visual Voicemail on its mobile devices. The patents were awarded years before Apple began work on the iPhone and iPad.

Brandywine was described by Verizon in a different lawsuit as "a patent holding company that is in the business of enforcing patent rights through the filing of various lawsuits," and indeed has sued almost every big name in the smartphone field over the same patents. The patents themselves describe a system by which a user could listen to an audio message while viewing multimedia or other data files attached to the message.

Today, this could be accomplished via most chat programs or e-mails where the body of the message was an audio recording accompanied by other attachments, but the original patent envisioned a traditional audio answering machine that could also store data files. Brandywine has previous sued Apple and a wide range of smartphone and tablet makers as a group in a lawsuit filed in September, and has not explained the necessity of suing Apple individually.

The lawsuit has been filed in U.S. district court in the middle district of Florida. If Brandywine maintains that Visual Voicemail is the technology violating the patents, including the iPad was in error as it doesn't support the feature, which Apple and AT&T co-developed in 2007. A company called Klausner Technologies sued Apple over Visual Voicemail and won a settlement and licensing of its own patents from AT&T and Apple in 2008.

Brandywine was itself sued by Verizon over wireless spectrum technology earlier this month. Apple has a number of patents on its Visual Voicemail and other methodologies it uses in its voicemail implementation that it could leverage to fight back against Brandywine.

By Electronista Staff