Google Maps may be banned in Germany as the result of a patent infringement lawsuit underway at a regional court in Germany. As FOSS Patents reports, Judge Matthias Zigann told Google today that he's inclined to hold the company liable for infringing a Microsoft patent that describes a "computer system for identifying local resources and method therefor." The judge reportedly called the patent, which describes how map data and local search results can be combined, a "big idea." Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents explains the possible ramifications if the judge sides with Microsoft, as expec [...]

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[caption id="attachment_65488" align="alignright" width="240"] Image courtesy Shutterstock.com[/caption] New York-based Vringo has sued Microsoft over two patents that pertain to the ranking and placement of ads in search results. The patents were originally issued in the early '90s and owned for a long time by Lycos, which later sold them. The patents in question are 6,314,420 and 6,775,664, referred to in the complaint (below) as the "420" and "664" patents. They wound up at Vringo, a company that sells video ringtones for mobile phones. The company's real business however is pat [...]

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Last week there was a report that "four out of five FTC commissioners" favored going forward with an antitrust case against Google. The Reuters article in which the claim appeared mentions but doesn't emphasize the litany of "vertical search" complaints against Google raised by competitors. Those "Google favors its own results" claims have been at the center of the European antitrust inquiry and, perhaps until now, at the heart of any potential US case against Google. Yet the article seems to suggest that the FTC is looking elsewhere for Google liability  -- or vulnerability. Reuters wr [...]

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Google's mostly ill-conceived patent screed from yesterday has opened the floodgates of discussion about Google's (Android's) vulnerability to third party patents owned by Microsoft, Oracle and Apple. Among the throng of comments and opinions about the episode are a few Google sympathizers, such as Forbes blogger Tim Lee who believes Google should advocate for the elimination of software patents: Unfortunately, the modest procedural changes being considered in the America Invents Act won’t come close to preventing the kind of abusive litigation that’s now plaguing Android. So Google sho [...]

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Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond has lashed out at rivals Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and unnamed others for waging what he says is "a hostile, organized campaign against Android," using "bogus patents." Drummond asserts that Google's rivals have joined together in an "anti-competitive" cabal of sorts that uses patent law almost as a pretext to attempt to "strangle" Android. (The phrase "anti-competitive" is self-consciously used four times in his post.) Drummond contends that Google's rivals are threatened by or unable to compete with Android's momentum (citing Android's 550,00 [...]

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Following the revelation last week that the iPhone stored user location data a consumer class action was filed. This kind of disclosure/revelation-class action cycle is now familiar. And because Google also collects location data it is now also the subject of a similar class action (Brown et al v. Google) seeking $50 million in damages. Google says it captures user location data only on an opt-in, consensual basis. Where Are the Damages? As a former lawyer who did a fair amount of plaintiff-side litigation in my past I'm sympathetic to the consumer class action and believe that it has bee [...]

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Although Google Offers hasn't formally launched yet, the service is already facing its first lawsuit. Walker Digital, a private R&D lab that created and launched Priceline.com in the late 1990s, is suing Google for allegedly violating four of the company's patents. The lawsuit, which asks the court for a jury trial, seeks unspecified damages and a permanent injunction. Google Offers began taking sign-ups yesterday in three U.S. locales and technically hasn't even launched yet. The Walker Digital lawsuit was filed in a US District Court last night. Earlier this month, the company file [...]

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The FOSS Patents blog reported that Google lost an important patent case on their Linux server kernels they have been using throughout the company. Bedrock Computer Technologies was awarded $5 million for Google infringing on their patent (U.S. Patent No. 5,893,120) named "Methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data." So besides for Google having to pay the $5 million, which is not much to Google, they may have to modify the current kernels of Linux used on their servers and maybe e [...]

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Google has bid $900 million (according to the Wall Street Journal) for an extensive patent portfolio owned by the now-bankrupt Canadian company Nortel Networks. The move is primarily defensive, as Google explains in a blog post: The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation. Some of these lawsuits have been filed by people or companies that have never actually created anything; others are motivated by a desire to block competing products or profit from the success of a rival’s new [...]

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Has Facebook patented social search? It appears so, according to a patent awarded earlier this year by the USPTO. The patent, written the same year Facebook was founded, has been previously discussed but escaped our notice until now. Originally filed in October 2004 and awarded this past February, the patent is for a system that uses social connections and clicks within the network to determine search-ranking relevance.  A piece in BNet calls the Facebook patent "curated search." However we might as well call it a patent on "social search." (See update below.) Here's what the abstract s [...]

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It's reasonable to say that the world of technology patents is screwed up and headed for some major reform. One area in which this is very apparent is location/mapping/geo. There are a number of seemingly conflicting or contradictory local and local-mobile patents that have been issued over the past several years. Some of these patents were issued to small companies and some are owned or were acquired by giants like Google and Microsoft. Now Redmond and Mountain View have joined forces to fight a common foe: a small company in Texas that holds a potentially sweeping mapping patent. T [...]

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As expected, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has re-filed his patent infringement lawsuit against some of the biggest companies on the web. The suit alleges that 11 companies have infringed on technology developed in the 1990s by Interval Licensing (AKA Interval Research Corporation), one of Allen's companies. The 11 companies named in the suit are Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, AOL, eBay, YouTube, NetFlix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Staples. Allen first filed the lawsuit in late August, but it was dismissed earlier this month as being too vague. The district court judge gave Allen until [...]

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A district court judge in Seattle has granted motions filed by Google and AOL to dismiss a Paul Allen patent infringement lawsuit against those two companies (and others). Judge Marsha Pechman agreed with both Google and AOL, who said that Allen's lawsuit was too vague. Allen's patent infringement complaint "failed to identify the infringing products or devices with any specificity," Pechman wrote in her ruling. You can read the full decision on Groklaw. Allen has until December 28th to refile the case. He first filed the lawsuit in late August, accusing 11 companies -- including Goo [...]

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News broke yesterday that Microsoft was suing Motorola for Android-related patent infringements. Microsoft said in a blog post that its patents cover a range of software functions used by Android devices (presumably this would apply to the iPhone as well): The Microsoft innovations at issue in this case help make smartphones "smart."  Indeed, our patents relate to key features that users have come to expect from every smartphone.  The ability to send and receive email on-the-go has driven smartphone adoption . . . Of course, for certain apps to run efficiently on handheld devices, th [...]

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In a lawsuit that will be closely watched Boston's Skyhook Wireless has sued Google for patent infringement and interfering in its business relationship with Motorola. Skyhook's principal business is providing location to third parties through the use of cell tower and WiFi location databases often referred to as "triangulation." Skyhook's system and technology is widely used by handset manufacturers, mobile application developers and others. Skyhook owns quite a few patents surrounding location determination and its infringement claims assert that Google has violated three of Skyhook's pat [...]

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Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder and one of the richest men on earth, has filed a patent infringement suit today against several Internet titans, the Wall Street Journal reports. The lawsuit centers on technology developed a decade ago by Interval Research Corp., a technology lab that Allen owned between 1992 and 2000. Eleven companies are named in the lawsuit: Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, eBay, YouTube, NetFlix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Staples. The lawsuit claims four patent violations of technologies that are widely used by search engines and e-commerce sites, according to the [...]

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StreetSpace is a company you probably haven't heard of, but it's not a so-called "patent troll" seeking to cash in on unimplemented intellectual property. Rather StreetSpace is a company that has been around since 1999 and installs internet kioks in public spaces, such as airports, retail locations and restaurants. Here's a description of its main product, the "Web Station": The Web Station™ was envisioned with the idea that users would be able to simply "Walk up to the Web" in thousands of retail locations, shopping malls, banks, transit hubs, restaurants, café's and places of interest [...]

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Oracle has filed suit against Google for allegedly infringing on patents they hold for Java, which Oracle acquired last year. Karen Tillman from Oracle said, "In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property. This lawsuit seeks appropriate remedies for their infringement." Google said they have not yet been served the lawsuit so cannot comment on this matter. cNet News has more detail, explaining that the complaint says Google is violating several patents, including 6,125,447; 6,192,476; 5,966,702; 7,426,720; RE38,10 [...]

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The clever folks in Redmond (aided by their attorneys) appear to have found a way to gain "licensing revenue" from Android phones. That's right. Android the OS is "free," and that was seen, early on, as a competitive advantage vs. Windows Mobile, which had exacted a price of up to $15 dollars per unit from handset makers. Yesterday, however, Microsoft announced it had reached a licensing agreement with longtime partner HTC regarding its patent portfolio and Android phones: Microsoft Corp. and HTC Corp. have signed a patent agreement that provides broad coverage under Microsoft’s patent [...]

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Google has been awarded a patent entitled "Determining and/or using location information in an ad system" that has very broad implications for PC and mobile advertising. While we all take geo-targeting today for granted, back when this Google patent application was filed in April, 2004 it wasn't as common. Dare I say it: Google may have just patented geo-targeting. Here's a discussion of the "what is claimed" from the patent: A computer-implemented method for controlling serving of an ad using its relevancy to a request, the method comprising: a) accepting, by a computer system including a [...]

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