Voxer, the company developing applications for smartphones, notably at the origin of Walkie Talkie, has just won its lawsuit against Meta.
Mark Zuckerberg’s company was indeed accused of infringing patents to include Voxer’s technology in its Facebook and Instagram Lives. Sentenced to pay a fine of $174.5 million, she has already planned to appeal the judgment.
Justice has decided, Meta will have to pay
Walkie Talkie is an application that was launched in 2011 and whose usefulness is easy to guess: several friends or contacts can connect on the same frequency and have a live voice chat. The company, founded by an Afghanistan veteran who particularly wanted this app to be used on the battlefield, has just won a first lawsuit against Meta, accused of having used its patents without its authorization. Representatives of Voxer would have, as early as 2016, tried to discuss it with Facebook to obtain an agreement. But no one listened to them before they found themselves in a Texas court. This one ended up deciding: the patent was not respected, and Meta will have to pay 174.5 million dollars.
A spokesperson for the group has already announced that it plans to appeal: We believe that the documents presented to the court proved that Meta did not infringe Voxer’s patents. »
A strategy proven many times over by Meta
According to documents available to the court, Facebook officials approached Voxer shortly after the app’s release, with the goal of working together on certain services. However, the collaboration did not happen, and the negotiations were therefore broken off, but not before Voxer shared its patent with the social network.
As every time the American giant fails to get the deal it wants from another company, Meta has since considered the much smaller development company as a competitor. As a result, he notably deprived her of most of the features of her social network. And yet, Walkie Talkie technology was still integrated into Facebook Live and Instagram Live. Customary of the fact, Mark Zuckerberg’s company regularly takes over the functionalities of its competitors who are successful. Stories copied from Snapchat and Reels inspired by TikTok are just the best-known examples. But this time, Meta didn’t even bother to develop a native clone of the application: it simply took over the patent shared by Voxer.
Despite the considerable fine of 174.5 million dollars claimed, it is however not certain that this will cause Meta to change its practices, as the company is now used to the courts and sometimes much larger fines.
Sources: Tech Crunch, Capital
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