Patents (Making money from litigation!)

See this: (source: CNET News)

Net2Phone, which filed its lawsuit last week in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, alleges that Skype infringed on its patent, No. 6,108,704. The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) patent was issued to Net2Phone in August 2000.

Net2Phone's lawsuit comes as the VoIP industry has seen a flood of new entrants from small start-ups to large, established Internet service providers.

Net2Phone alleges that Skype, a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay, violated its "point-to-point Internet Protocol" patent. The patent calls for the exchange of IP addresses between processing units in order to establish a direct communications link between the devices via the Internet.

Skype uses a peer-to-peer technology to operate its VoIP service, whereas companies such as Vonage and AT&T largely use a system that is centrally managed to transfer calls to a traditional phone network.

Do you not think that this is a really stupid patent? It calls for exchange of IP addresses in order to establish direct communictaion links... if you wish to send a packet directly to someone else, you will want to know its IP address, otherwise you will need an intermediate link which knows the IP address. This is the obvious logic which any college kid given a standard programming assignment to tackle such a problem will come up with! Where is the innovation?