Trademark plaintiff drops suit vs Google over ads
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The plaintiff in a long-running  trademark infringement lawsuit against Google Inc agreed on  Friday to drop its case targeting the Web search advertising  leader&#39;s core business, according to court filings.
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LONDON - A US federal court has ruled that Google can continue selling advertising linked to user searches for trademarked words after insurance firm Geico lost its legal battle to halt the search giant doing so.
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A FEDERAL judge in Alexandria, Va., will hear opening arguments today in a case that pits Geico against Google. Geico, the auto insurer owned by Berkshire Hathaway, sued Google in May for trademark infringement.
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Google won an important test case in the US yesterday when a federal court judge cleared its practice of selling ads around internet searches conducted for trademarked terms.
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A federal appeals court handed Google Inc a setback in a patent fight on Wednesday, tossing out part of a summary judgment in the Web search engine's favor in a lawsuit filed by Hyperphrase Technologies, LLC.
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A Chinese firm making iPods for Apple Computer Incorporated has dropped its defamation lawsuit against two journalists who accused the company of mistreating workers.
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The subcontractor accused of mistreating workers at an iPod factory in China dropped its libel suit against two reporters and the news organization they work for in Shanghai.
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Online auctioneer eBay Inc. has  pulled its advertising from search company Google Inc.&#39;s  AdWords network in the United States, an eBay spokesman said on  Wednesday.
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ALEXANDRIA, Va.  - A federal judge on Wednesday  handed online search engine Google Inc. a victory in a  trademark infringement case on Wednesday, ruling that when  users searched for insurer GEICO, Google could display rivals  as well.
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Google&#39;s browser toolbar is back in court on patent infringement charges, after a U.S. court of appeals overturned part of a lower court decision. Google&#39;s AdSense contextual advertising service, though, is in the clear.Hyperphrase Technologies filed suit against Google in April 2006, alleging that Google&#39;s AdSense and the AutoLink function of its toolbar infringed claims in four Hyperphrase patents relating to the contextual linking and presentation of information. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin rejected the allegations in a summary judgement in Google&#39;s favor, and Hyperphrase appealed.On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the parts of the summary judgement relating to AdSense, and some of the claims against AutoLink, but overturned the part of the ruling dealing with AutoLink&#39;s alleged infringement of two of the patents. It remanded the case to the district court to be reexamined.AutoLink parses Web pages for text fragments in certain formats, and transforms them into links to Web pages it deems appropriate. For instance, it will link publication International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) to a corresponding listing on Amazon.com&#39;s bookstore, or link package tracking numbers to pages showing delivery status. It will similarly process U.S. street addresses and U.S. vehicle identification numbers.In its ruling , the court of appeals found that the district court had considered an inappropriate interpretation for &quot;data reference,&quot; one of the terms used in the patent claims to describe the way a link is made between a fragment of text and an element in a database. The court of appeals remanded the case to the district court to determine whether AutoLink infringed the patents under the new interpretation it suggested.Some have likened AutoLink, introduced in early 2005, to an earlier initiative from Microsoft called Smart Tags, which sought to add links determined by Microsoft to certain keywords appearing on Web pages viewed through its Internet Explorer browser. The feature, included in beta versions of the browser bundled with Windows XP, was roundly rejected by users for the control it gave Microsoft over the appearance of Web pages, prompting the company to&#160;remove the feature&#160;from production versions in June 2001. However, it left the function in its Office XP productivity software suite, released in May 2001, where it became the subject of another patent lawsuit brought by Hyperphrase. Microsoft won a summary judgement in that case in 2003.In Wednesday&#39;s ruling on the Google-Hyperphrase case, the court of appeals upheld the judgement of the district court regarding AdSense. The way AdSense infers the topic of a Web page to associate it with keywords that may not appear on the page, and link those keywords to advertisements, did not constitute use of a &quot;data reference&quot; in the sense of the Hyperphrase patents at issue, the district court had found, and the court of appeals agreed.A Google representative reached in London would not immediately comment on the court of appeals ruling.The company&#39;s latest quarterly financial report warns that is subject to intellectual property rights claims, and may face more in the future. Such cases are costly to defend and could require it to pay damages or prevent it from using certain technologiesOne such case, brought by Northeastern University in Boston and by Jarg, a company in Massachusetts that develops distributed search technologies,&#160;charges Google with infringing a patent&#160;for a method of breaking database queries into fragments and distributing them to multiple computers to get search results faster. Google has until Jan. 11 to file a response in that case.&#160;
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A federal appeals court handed  Google  a setback in a patent fight on Wednesday,  tossing out part of a summary judgment in Google's favor in a  lawsuit filed by Hyperphrase Technologies, LLC.
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A U.S. federal judge dismissed  Alcatel-Lucent's  patent claim against Microsoft  Corp.  over technology that converts speech into text,  the two companies said on Friday.
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Google won a major legal victory Wednesday when a US judge said the search engine could continue to sell ads triggered by searches that use trademarked company names.
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Google won a major legal victory when a federal judge ruled that the search engineâs advertising policy does not violate federal trademark laws.
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A federal judge heard arguments Monday in a trademark dispute that could threaten millions in advertising revenue for search engine Google Inc.
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Google responded on Friday to a lawsuit filed against it by Northeastern University, denying claims that its search service infringes on patented technology.Google denied all charges in the suit, which was&#160;filed jointly by Northeastern, of Boston, and a search technology company called Jarg, of Waltham, Mass. Google also filed a counterclaim asking the court to dismiss the patent as invalid.The&#160;suit was filed in November&#160;in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. It seeks an injunction preventing Google from further infringement, as well as royalty payments and damages.The patent in question describes a distributed database system that breaks queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster search results.The plaintiffs say that Google uses this system to run its search engine, and that the system was invented by Kenneth Baclawski, an associate professor at Northeastern and one of Jarg&#39;s founders. Northeastern was awarded a patent for the system, which it has licensed exclusively to Jarg.In its response Friday, Google argued that the patent is invalid and should not have been awarded in the first place. It cites various sections of U.S. patent law, including those that deal with the novelty of an invention and prior art. It also cites the doctrine of &quot;laches,&quot; which essentially requires plaintiffs to file lawsuits in a timely manner.Its counterclaim asks the court to declare the patent invalid and unenforceable.Both parties have requested a jury trial, and legal experts have said the case could be resolved in 18 months to two years.The U.S. patent, number 5,694,593, is dated Dec. 2, 1997, and can be viewed by searching the Web site of the U.S. Patent &amp; Trademark Office. U.S. patent law is also described on the USPTO Web site in this PDF file. Google&#39;s reply cites sections 101, 102, 103, and 112.
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A federal appeals court handed Google a setback in a patent fight on Wednesday, tossing out part of a summary judgment in Google's favor in a lawsuit filed by Hyperphrase Technologies, LLC.