what we have here is a patent troll trying to strong arm BT.
Four British judges sitting in the UK's High Court and Court of Appeal have all ruled in favour of ASSIA, in four separate judgments to date.
Likewise in four
opposition proceedings brought before the European Patent Office; patent examiners there too have rejected BT's arguments. ASSIA's patents for its DLM inventions are valid and BT is infringing them. Case closed.
At some point BT has got to stop digging, hold its hands up, utter those magic words (
mea culpa) and cough up.
But, as we can see, BT (via its shills and stooges) would prefer, still, to argue otherwise!
It's also a bit low to slight Professor John Cioffi and associates as
patent trolls. They hold over 400 patents in the field of DSL. Cioffi personally filed 105 of them. [1]
Reasonably enough, Cioffi & Co called
The Register to task for just this: accusing them of being patent trolls;
The Register has since acknowledged that it was wrong and retracted its slur. [2]
Cioffi is recognised as one of the
Fathers of DSL; all serious literature on DSL acknowledges his place in history. Without Cioffi and his company ASSIA Inc., we would still be communicating with acoustic couplers, bean cans, damp string, and such like. In fact, with BT's decrepit and under-invested network, it often seems like we still are!
Notice how ASSIA post DLM switch off suddenly changed tack and came out with how BT turning the DLM off is going to significantly disadvantage customers. Clearly they thought that BT would pay up.
According to the High Court judgment, it is, in fact, the other way. (see para.15 of [3] )
It was BT, and not ASSIA, arguing that millions of customers would be affected if it was held to infringe (which it was):
This, from the Dec 2013 approved judgment of Mr Justice Birss:
At one point in the argument BT's counsel were anxious to point out that if BT is held to infringe, this may have an impact on all the home broadband connections provided by BT across the whole country.
So that was BT's puerile argument: "we're too grand to be held to account".
And isn't it interesting that BT's counsel cautioned that *all* of its home broadband connections (VDSL and ADSL) may be impacted by an injunction? What ever is BT admitting? That its 20CN and 21CN DLM Systems (for ADSL) are infringing too?!
ASSIA will be left with sweet FA...
Unsurprisingly, that's not a view shared by ASSIA. Dave Burstein, one of its advisors, said "the potential royalties ASSIA may win are substantial"; he compared it to the
TI vs Conexant patent case which resulted in a $70 million award to the claimant (TI).
It is surprising to see BT getting busted here, and on British soil. In previous altercations with the UK courts, it has managed to curry favour in the right places, to see off legal actions for obvious wrongdoing; e.g. over its involvement in unlawful espionage in the
Phorm scandal, and in the earlier
Crabtree Ruling from 1997. [4]
What does this all mean for the consumer though? Many FTTC subscribers are reporting that with no DLM, they're finding their lines are stuck on highly capped profiles with heavy interleaving. Not fit for purpose then; not as described. Consumer compensation on the cards? Let's hope so.
--
[1]
http://web.stanford.edu/group/cioffi/doc/cioffi-patent-list.pdf[2]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/26/bt_starts_shutting_pulling_patentinfringing_boxes_from_dsl_network/ (see the "bootnote")
[3]
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Patents/2013/3768.html[4]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8438461/BT-and-Phorm-how-an-online-privacy-scandal-unfolded.html
