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Comment by tinus_hn | Hacker News Reader

No major video conferencing setup has peer to peer video because that is an ‘innovation’ patented by VirnetX.

I'm pretty sure Whatsapp/Facetime is P2P for video calling. But I'm not sure about a video conferencing solution i.e. a multi-party/group call. I have a service that sniffs packets going in/out of my home network which maps the remote IP to a registered ASN and the Lat/Lon coordinates. All of my Whatsapp sessions have been tagged with the name of the ISP at the other end and the right position coordinates. Not Facebook's/Apple's.

Follow-up : Was on a group call today on WhatsApp. All packets were being routed through Facebook. So, group calls are indeed not E2E.

What? So my self-hosted P2P WebRTC is in violation of a patent? And the companies I set these services up for too? Are all the others (zoom, go-to, uberconf, jitsi, etc) just not doing P2P?

IIRC P2P doesn't scale beyond a few participants because all the streams are going to all participants. Centralized can reduce bandwidth and number of data exchanges

Centralize on the peer who hosted/called the meeting?

I think Skype P2P relied on super nodes which had the best bandwidth and processing

Maybe, I've had 10 in a room w/o much issue - but my team is all on good pipes. It's not a webinar.

But scale is a different (easier?) problem/risk than patent troll.

Prior art on peer to peer video conferencing from 1992: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe

I doubt Virnetx’s patent is particularly strong.

> Apple responded by petitioning the PTO to invalidate these four patents. Through these various proceedings (and others initiated by additional interested parties), the PTO has invalidated every patent claim VirnetX has asserted against Apple, finding all either anticipated or obvious.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/19/19-832/126835/2019...

The four patents in question:

* https://patents.google.com/patent/US7418504B2/en

* https://patents.google.com/patent/US7921211B2/en

* https://patents.google.com/patent/US6502135B1/en

* https://patents.google.com/patent/US7490151B2/en

Sadly though, that decision by the PTO was partially reversed by the courts:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/09/virnetx-reverses-...

Their patent is BS. It's obvious, and probably has prior art too.

Tell that to Apple who just had to pay them about $500 million in a final judgement.

Aren’t software patents unenforceable in Europe?

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