The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Dec. 31, 1996
Filed:
Mar. 03, 1995
Thomas B London, Tinton Falls, NJ (US);
Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, NJ (US);
Abstract
A telephone subscriber of a privacy communications service is allowed to use a randomly selected non-assigned telephone number--instead of the subscriber's real telephone number--as a return phone number in a telephone message left for a called party. The non-assigned, randomly selected telephone number becomes inoperative after a threshold that may be pre-imposed by the subscriber is exceeded. According to a feature of the invention, the function of randomly selecting a non-assigned telephone number may also include replacing the calling party number with the randomly selected number. Hence, when a caller-id display unit receives the telephone number of an incoming call for which the privacy communications service is used, the randomly selected telephone number--as opposed to the real telephone number--is received and recorded by the caller-id display unit.