Are Patent Wars Impacting the IP Telephony Market?
The incredibly precise nature of patent law, and potential concerns for the hardware side of the IP telephony market, can be seen by looking at the recent news Apple is being sued for infringing a patent for a “mobile phone with a headset,” simply because Apple includes multifunction headphones with each iPhone they sell. While common sense argues that a multifunction headphone probably doesn’t count as a “headset,” the patent being brought up in this case revolves around a removable headset that is designed “to receive at least telephony audio signals from the phone, and to provide audio signals to the phone.”