Vonage got some good news this week, winning a permanent stay on the injunction that might well have put the consumer VoIP pioneer out of business.

The company is apparently celebrating by giving customers a handy new feature: Vonage Text, which transcribes voicemails to text so you can read them right from your e-mail.

It may seem small, but it’s an extremely powerful feature.

For example, how often have you strained to listen to a message in a noisy place like an airport? Now you can easily see what the message is. Plus, it’s much less obtrusive if you’re in a restaurant or at a party.

Or consider the situation where you have several messages waiting. This lets you quickly scan messages and see what you need to do something about right away and what can wait.

Think about how often a voicemail is an answer to a request for information. This is a simple way to file that directly where you’ll be able to find it when you need it. And it saves paper, too.

Most important perhaps is the way this continues to chip away the barriers to truly converged personal communications. Some people like to hear email. Others like to read voicemail. It’s one more step to having it your way, instead of the service provider’s way. And that’s just good news for customers.

As predicted, “prior art” has been found for the patents that Verizon claims that Vonage has infringed on. Fierce VoIP’s Dan Rosenbaum noted it this morning. It’s a USENET post from 1995 describing the connection of calls between the Internet and the PSTN. The author, Jack Decker, says in his introduction, I want to go on record as proposing this now so that when someone gets the bright idea in a few
months or years, I can point to this as ‘prior art.’”

Let the fun begin.

Because everything to do with Vonage seems to be headline news lately, the routine call termination agreement the beleaguered provider signed with VoIP Incorporated a few weeks ago thrust the Orlando, FL-based consumer and wholesale communications company into the news as well.

But VoIP Inc is interesting in its own right, not least because of its outspoken CTO Shawn Lewis.

Lewis has been in the VoIP space a long time. A decade ago he wrote the patent for the first softswitch and SS7 gateway while at Xcom Technologies. These patents were subsequently bought by Level3 and made public.

He subsequently started Caerus — now a subsidiary of VoIP Inc — a CLEC that provides wholesale communications services. He’s watched VoIP grow from “hobbyist” to mainstream technology, “with a lot of Vonage’s help,” he adds.

Technology wasn’t what attracted Lewis to VoIP. The appeal was money.

In the mid-1990s, Lewis owned a dial-up ISP. “With telecom deregulation, we realized that if we were a phone company we could collect so much more per minute for phone calls.”

On a long flight, Lewis and his partner discussed the costs of becoming a phone company. “To implement it, we’d need a physical switch in each city,” he recalls. “We were looking at about $14 million for each city.

“I thought: if we could use modem banks as telephony switches, we wouldn’t need intermediate switches. We started working on a software application for communicating with telephone systems using modem banks because they had DSPs. That’s when Level 3 stepped in and bought those patents.”

With his background, Lewis has insight into both sides of today’s patent fights. (In fact, VoIP Inc recently contacted several companies it believes are infringing on its click-to-call patents. The company says it hopes to resolve this amicably.)

Lewis isn’t shy about weighing on the Verizon/Vonage patent lawsuit.

There’s a cost to developing intellectual property, he says, and it should be protected. However, “if you’re going to enforce patent rights you should have a use for them. There should be practice and use analysis to patent awarding.

“Why didn’t Verizon enforce the patent before,” he continues. “Instead of waiting until the peak moment to jump into the market and rape everybody. Now, because there’s a threat of competition you see people trying to put a choke hold on the business.”

In addition, Verizon has opened a Pandora’s box that won’t be easily closed.

“I can guarantee somewhere out there exists a patent that pre-dates Verizon’s,” he says. “Probably 20, 25 people will stand up and say they have patents. It’s going to be a mess. A lot of people are going to be afraid to enter this field.”

Part of the problem is the nature of these patents, according to Lewis.

‘If I asked you to look at a circle and a square, everyone could tell me the difference. But that’s not the case with these Internet integration patents. Here we’re talking about [process and use] technology where interpretation is different for every person.

“There needs to be a high level review of how we look at patents,” he adds. “There needs to be a new set of rules.”

While the dust is still settling about the Vonage injunction it’s still premature to say that VoIP-as-we-know-it is over.

That’s the view of SunRocket’s Brian Lustig.

‘It’s important to note that every Internet phone service provider has their own distinct architecture for their network,” he says. “It’s constructed differently, done in its own unique way. So each provider has to do their own analysis.”

The bottom line: “It would be inappropriate to assume that what applies to other [VoIP] companies applies to all companies.”

SunRocket recently signed up its 200,000th customer. Not perhaps in Vonage’s league, but healthy four-fold growth since 2006. The company is taking a “strategic” approach to growth, says Lustig. “It’s a deliberate strategy to keep costs in check.”

It looks like Chicken Little was right.

The sky is falling and Foxy Woxy Verizon is going to snap off Vonage’s head with a permanent injunction that bids fair to shut down the VoIP provider.

Now I’m certainly no expert on intellectual property law so I’ll leave comment about the legal ins and outs to the lawyers.

But as a citizen, I think there’s something here that gets to the heart of the whole notion of intellectual property.

Nobody disputes your right to the opportunity to make money from your inventions — think Thomas Edison and the incandescent light bulb. It’s not an abstract valuation of human creativity. It’s an incentive to bring new inventions to market that make life better, easier, more enjoyable. Even the Chinese have come round to recognize that patent and copyright protection is to their advantage in the long run.

But suppose Edison had patented the light bulb so he could prevent other people from using the technology while he continued to make a killing in his candle-manufacturing monopoly?

Closer to the present, suppose Tim Berners-Lee had patented the World Wide Web and socked the technology away so he could slap a patent infringement lawsuit on everyone creating an accessible user interface for the Internet? You probably wouldn’t be reading the New York Times — or me, for that matter — online.

Let’s face it. If we waited for Verizon to deliver VoIP, we’d still be waiting. Ten years ago when pioneers were going out on a limb experimenting with IP for voice communications Verizon was nowhere to be found.

And now that I think about it, maybe Verizon needs to answer to us, the people, about why they had this technology and didn’t use it to give us low-cost phone calls. Or the other features that are now commonplace with VoIP — free voicemail, call waiting, caller ID or voicemail-to-email.

Verizon may have won in the court of law but in the court of public opinion, the jury is still deliberating.