A federal court has snubbed America Online Inc in its attempt to prevent AT&T Corp and others from using phrases such as You have mail in email and instant messaging systems, which AOL considers to be proprietary information covered by trademarks. The US District Court for the eastern district of Virginia on Friday granted AT&T summary judgment regarding the use of you have mail, IM, and buddy list declaring that they are nobody’s property and therefore AT&T and others are free to use them. AOL has a federally registered trademark on buddy list and the other two are pending. Although it uses You Have Mail in a text alert, AOL uses the phrase You’ve got mail for the voice-alert when mail arrives, but says it was not part of this suit.
AT&T, obviously fairly confident of its position, requested a summary judgement in May. The judgement means that judge Claude Hilton does not believe there is a case to answer given the evidence presented. AOL says it will appeal the decision and says it is confident the decision will be reversed in the court of appeals.
AOL’s shares closed down $1.9375, or 2.0% at $94.9375 and was the most active stock on the New York Stock Exchange in terms of share volume, while AT&T finished the day off $0.25, or 0.5% at $49.00.
AOL had dropped the even broader term instant messaging from the case back in April, but sought a temporary restraining order against AT&T almost immediately, which was turned down by judge Hilton. However, as AT&T’s instant messaging technology is not its own, but licensed from Tribal Voice Inc, AOL sued that company as well. Tribal Voice says this judgement does not include its suit as that was on hold until something happened in the AT&T case. AOL has 15 days from last Friday’s judgement to take action against Tribal Voice for use of similar phrases in its PowWow system.
AOL originally filed suit against AT&T in December, shortly after AT&T changed its pricing model to flat rate to go head-to-head with AOL and introduce the instant messaging capability to its WorldNet users (12/16/99). AT&T claimed it had been using the phrase for more than 20 years, dating back to Unix email systems and also claimed that other companies are using it on the web already.
Separately, Tribal Voice says it has had more than one hundred requests for evaluation copies of its PowWow for Private Networks intranet version of its PowWow IM tool since its release two weeks ago, including requests from Cisco Systems Inc and Amazon.com Inc, among others.
