Bea Beltran Tech 09.22.2022 23:Sep PM EDT

Meta Loses Patent Infringement Case to Voxer, Costing them $175 million

Voxer, a live walkie talkie messaging app for smartphones was approached by Facebook in 2012 for the possibility of a collaboration initiating meetings between the two companies.

However, these meetings did not yield results and soon after, Facebook identified Voxer as a competitor despite not having competing products or services at the time and even went as far as revoking access to certain Facebook features, says an article from LA Times.

Live videos have been made available by parent company Meta in 2015 and 2016 for Facebook and Instagram, respectively, which led Tom Katis, the co-creator of Voxer to accuse Facebook of stealing their proprietary technology keeping in mind that they have shared their patent portfolio with the social media giant years before.

Another thing mentioned in the LA Times, the issue has been brought to court and after seven days of trial and a day of deliberation, a federal jury from in Austin, Texas found that Meta infringed two patents that were owned by Voxer, Inc., and that Meta Platforms Incorporated was liable to pay $174.5 million in royalty damages.

Court documents state that Voxer founder had a meeting with the senior product manager of Facebook Live. In this meeting, Katis raised his concern with Facebook Live's infringement of their proprietary streaming technologies, but Meta refused to enter an agreement regarding their further use of Voxer's technologies.

Nine months after Meta's refusal to an agreement in February 2016, they then released Instagram Live despite the unresolved issue between Meta and Voxer, as mentioned by TechCrunch.

What was Meta's response to the jury's verdict?

Meta Platforms Incorporated says that they will appeal the nearly $175 million verdict, sticking to their statement that they did not infringe Voxer Incorporated's patented technologies.

According to Reuters, the megacorporation told the court in filing that a juror should not find anything that points to infringement since the services of the two opposing companies does not work in the same way and that they were not entitled to any damages.

What exactly is Voxer and what does it do?

Voxer is a push-to-talk voice communication app for remote teams. It was founded by Tom Katis and Matt Ranney. The former was a Green Beret and decided to create the app after facing problems while serving in the US Army. During an ambush in Afghanistan, he tried to contact the medical team in a firefight while talking to other parties but government-issued walkie-talkies simply did not have that functionality, he said in an interview with TechCrunch.

The app allows instant voice communication, text, video transmissions, and can also share your location. The app is compatible with Android, iPhone and the web and it works through any 3G, 4G, or WIFI network in the world.

This essentially makes communication between groups or individuals possible no matter how far apart they are. It also records the message simultaneously so the message could also be listened to later when needed.