Legal > Legal: Patents
Jul. 22, 2008 at 8:53am by Greg Sterling
Will Software Patents (Including On Search Algorithms ) Go Away?
It's fairly safe to say: 1) patent law is a mess, 2) patent law is in transition, and 3) newer court rulings are reducing the rights of patent holders. But in a very provocative argument, based on recent cases, the PatentlyO law blog argues that new rules and tests imposed...
See Related Stories In: Legal: Patents
Jan. 7, 2008 at 9:47am by Barry Schwartz
Google, AOL, Yahoo, & Digg Sued For Playing Online Solitaire
Digg And Others Sued For Infringing Infamous Computer Solitaire Patent from Techdirt reports Google, Yahoo, AOL, and even Digg were all sued by Sheldon F. Goldberg for patent infringement of US Patent 6,264,560. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls Sheldon a wanted person who has crimes against the public domain for...
See Related Stories In: Google: Legal, Legal: Patents, Yahoo: Legal
Dec. 26, 2007 at 3:04pm by Barry Schwartz
US Appeals Court Give Google AdSense Patent Victory But Autolink Still Under Question
U.S. appeals court hands Google patent case setback from Reuters reports a US appeals court has partially overturned the initial ruling in Google favor in a patent infringement case filed by Hyperphrase Technologies, LLC. The court supported the initial ruling that AdSense did not infringe on Hyperphrase patents, but it...
See Related Stories In: Google: AdSense, Google: Legal, Google: Toolbar, Legal: Patents
Nov. 12, 2007 at 9:14am by Barry Schwartz
Northeastern University Sues Google Over Index Database Design
Northeastern sues Google over patent from The Boston Globe reports that Northeastern University and a company founded by a Northeastern professor, Kenneth P. Baclawski, is suing Google for patent infringement. The issue at hand in this case is that Northeastern has patented a method of storing database queries back in...
See Related Stories In: Google: Legal, Legal: Patents
Oct. 3, 2007 at 9:49am by Barry Schwartz
AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Sued Over Competitive Bidding Patent
AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Sued Over Competitive Bidding Patent from InformationWeek reports Performance Pricing filed a patent lawsuit (PDF document) against AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo over how they use competitive bidding within their search ad marketplace. The patent, named Systems and methods for transacting business over a global communications,...
See Related Stories In: AOL: Search Marketplace, Google: Legal, Legal: Patents, Microsoft: Business Issues, Yahoo: Legal
Aug. 9, 2007 at 1:40am by Bill Slawski
Supplemental Results and Google's Extended Databases
Until very recently, you might have seen a label next to a search result in Google that indicated it was a "supplemental" result. A couple of patents from Google, one of which was granted this week and one from earlier this year, discuss how a search query might return results...
See Related Stories In: Google: SEO, Google: Web Search, Legal: Patents, Search Resources
Jul. 2, 2007 at 11:11am by Greg Sterling
Local.com And Dueling Local Search Patents
A flurry of recently granted patents is starting to cloud the local search space. After being granted a patent for location-based search, Local.com this morning announced the awarding of another patent for an "ad supported 411 local search model." Local.com's stock shot up 52 percent on the announcement....
See Related Stories In: Legal: Patents, Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines
Jun. 25, 2007 at 10:26am by Greg Sterling
Local.com Announces Patent For Location-Based Search
I've got a patent, you've got a patent. It seems that nearly everyone running an Internet company has a patent nowadays. Local.com is the latest to announce a patent in the local space. The patent (no. 7,231,405), which I was unable to locate through a USPTO and Google Patents search,...
See Related Stories In: Legal: Patents, Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines
Jun. 15, 2007 at 9:07am by Greg Sterling
Local Mobile Search Provider 1-800-Free411 Touts Patent Against Rivals
USAToday writes about a recently awarded patent obtained by Jingle Networks, which operates the 1-800-Free411 ad-supported directory assistance service. After conducting several searches at the USPTO and elsewhere I was unable to find a copy of the patent itself. However, according to the article: Jingle's patent, which it bought from...
See Related Stories In: Legal: Patents, Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines
Jun. 11, 2007 at 8:24pm by Greg Sterling
Patent Suit Has Broad Implications For Local Search
Wired is reporting on a lawsuit filed in US District Court in Texas against Verizon and its now spun-off directory division Idearc. The suit (PDF file) claims infringement of patent 5,930,474, "Internet organizer for accessing geographically and topically based information." This goes to the essence of many if not most...
See Related Stories In: Legal: Patents
Mar. 22, 2007 at 1:27am by Bill Slawski
New Google Mobile Phone Search Patent Applications
Is there a Google Phone waiting to be released, or just mobile software that makes it easier for people to use Google to search with? How serious is Google about mobile search? How would such a system work? I ran into a patent application on the World Intellectual Property Organization...
See Related Stories In: Google: Mobile, Google: Patents, Legal: Patents
Mar. 8, 2007 at 9:25am by Barry Schwartz
Google Wins Google Earth Patent Case
Google wins key ruling in patent dispute from BusinessWeek reports that the patent case against Google over Google Earth has now been closed. Google has won the dispute dating back to 2002, when it was filed by Skyline Software Systems against Keyhole, which Google later acquired and whose software became...
See Related Stories In: Google: Earth, Google: Legal, Legal: Patents
Feb. 28, 2007 at 9:23am by Bill Slawski
Are You Putting Web Search Results at Risk with Paid Advertising?
If you bid on keywords for a term or phrase that you rank well for in a search engine, might your organic result be filtered in some instances, when your ad appears on the same page? A newly granted Microsoft patent is the first I recall seeing which discusses such...
See Related Stories In: Legal: Censorship, Legal: Crawling & Indexing, Legal: Patents, Microsoft: Live Search, Search & Society: General, Search Ads: General
Jan. 17, 2007 at 3:55pm by Bill Slawski
Google Billboard & Google Kiosk Coming?
Clickz columnist Ryan Naraine wrote up some of his thoughts about a Google patent application (Allocating advertising space in a network of displays) that would enable advertising upon electronic displays and billboards in shopping centers and other places, in his article Google Patent Filing Hints at Digital Billboard Ad Network....
See Related Stories In: Google: Other Ads, Google: Patents, Legal: Patents
Jan. 12, 2007 at 1:34pm by Bill Slawski
Search Patent Documents for 1-12-07 - Limited Access Documents in Search Results
A wide range of newly published patent applications and granted patents, covering such ground as subscribed content in search results from Google; tag searching, detecting similar audio files, and simpler support vector machines from Yahoo; geographic based searching from MetaCarta; and data center architecture and smarter results to queries from...
See Related Stories In: Google: Patents, Legal: Patents, Search Features: Tagging
Jan. 4, 2007 at 3:21pm by Bill Slawski
Improved Information Retrieval - Looking at Context with Susan Dumais
Desktop and file search can be very different than web search, and the user's context plays an important role in what is valuable when creating a search algorithm. But understanding context may be helpful to web search, too. Microsoft's Susan Dumais has done an extensive amount of research on how...
See Related Stories In: Legal: Patents, Microsoft: Live Search, Search Engines: Personalized Search Engines, Stats: Search Behavior
Jan. 3, 2007 at 9:38am by Barry Schwartz
Intertainer Sues Google For Patent Infringement On Online Video & Audio Distribution
The NY Times reports that Google, Apple and Napster were all sued by Jonathan T. Taplin's Intertainer for patent infringement of a 2005 patent. Intertainer's patent covers commercial distribution of audio and video over the Internet. I believe this is the patent application filed on November 24, 2005, named "Digital...
See Related Stories In: Google: Legal, Legal: Patents
Dec. 28, 2006 at 10:20am by Bill Slawski
Patent Filing for Google Mobile Search Provides Indexing Clues
Mobile search has its own rules, and if you want your pages indexed for people searching with handhelds, it may help to take a look at some of the patent applications that have come out lately from Microsoft and Google on the topic. Microsoft provided some details about what they...
See Related Stories In: Google: Mobile, Legal: Patents, SEO: Mobile Search
Dec. 25, 2006 at 9:13am by Barry Schwartz
Judge Dismisses Google AdSense & AutoLink Toolbar Lawsuits
Judge dismisses lawsuit against Google at BusinessWeek covers a patent infringement case against Google over AdSense and Google Toolbar's AutoLink feature being tossed out. The case was brought by HyperPhrase Inc. against Google. The judge dismissed the infringement claims, calling the AdSense claims "nonsense" and finding that AutoLink "performs a...
See Related Stories In: Google: AdSense, Google: Legal, Google: Toolbar, Legal: Patents
Dec. 21, 2006 at 2:15am by Bill Slawski
Search Patents Filings from 12-20-06 - Reranking on Information Redundancy and on Searcher Affinities
Some processes covered in patents granted last week by the US Patent and Trademark Office: Microsoft reranking results based upon redundancy of information, Ask reranking pages based upon affinities between searchers, Hewlett-Packard creating queries for searchers to investigate from scanned documents, and; Exalead forming dynamic query refinements from words found...
See Related Stories In: Legal: Patents
Dec. 12, 2006 at 7:56am by Danny Sullivan
Google Patents Search Results Page
Google patented "Graphical User Interface" from Dirson notes that Google was granted a patent today on its "graphical user interface" that most of us would call its search results page. Perhaps that might stop some of the copying going on! Seriously, I can't find enough about the patent to see...
