Google wins another copyright case
213743
Blog: Google wins on appeal in Usenet copyright case.
414135
Google Inc. won a major legal victory Wednesday when a federal judge ruled that the search engine's advertising policy does not violate federal trademark laws.
584449
A district judge has ruled that Google can continue selling advertising triggered by searches for trademarked brand names. Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that the adwords program does not violate US federal trademark laws.
509070
Eastman Kodak Co  won another  round in a battle with Ampex Corp  on Thursday over who  owns the patents for digital imaging.
750191
Google is facing another setback against its News service after a court in Belgium ruled the search giant is violating copyright law by indexing and linking to stories in Belgian newspapers. The decision is the latest in a series of challenges against the site.
608936
By Eric Pfanner  A copyright dispute between Google and a group of publishers in Belgium escalated Friday as the Internet search engine defied a court order to publish an earlier decision in the case on its Belgian Web sites.
102759
A Belgian court rules that the search company violates copyright law by providing free access to news stories that online newspapers generally charge for. By the Associated Press.
369584
Google responded to a lawsuit filed against it by Northeastern University, denying claims that its core search service infringes on patented technology.
74758
A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that a trademark infringement suit filed by the Government Employees Insurance Co. (GEICO) against Internet search giants Google and Overture Services can proceed.
333473
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;
355087
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.
80775
Don't publish and .be damned Google has lost its appeal to Belgian courts to ditch part of the ruling in a copyright case against its news service which it lost earlier this month.â¦
401922
(InfoWorld) - ViacomÂ has sued Google, alleging copyright infringement from video-sharing site YouTube and seeking $1 billion in damages. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, follows a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) requestÂ Viacom sent to Google last monthÂ related to the unauthorized posting of Viacom videos to YouTube. At the time,Â Viacom demanded that GoogleÂ remove more than 100,000 of its clipsÂ from YouTube, which Google acquired last year for $1.65 billion. Google said it would comply with the request. In escalating its battle with YouTube with this lawsuit, Viacom reiterates that YouTube has allowed and benefitted from "massive intentional" copyright violations of Viacom videos. In addition to $1 billion inÂ damages, Viacom is asking the court for an injunction barring Google and YouTube from continuing the alleged infringement, Viacom said Tuesday in a statement. Google stands ready to fight the allegations and is confident that "YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders," a Google spokesman said via e-mail. "We will certainly not let this suit become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube and its ability to attract more users, more traffic, and build a stronger community," he wrote. Almost 160,000 Viacom video clips have been uploaded to YouTube without permission and have been viewed over 1.5 billion times, Viacom alleges. "YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google," Viacom charged in the statement. Google and YouTube illegally profit from the traffic that the unauthorized videos draw to their sites by selling advertising, according to Viacom, which added that YouTube has been lax in its attempts to stop its users from uploading copyrighted videos without permission. Viacom decided to sue Google after negotiations and other measures failed to halt the alleged copyright infringement in YouTube, Viacom said. Viacom is a media conglomerate whose properties include MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Comedy Central, and Paramount Pictures. The case is unlikely to result in a total shutdown of YouTube because legitimate uses of the site exist beyond the potentially illegal activities Viacom is objecting to, said Sheldon Klein, an attorney specializing in intellectual-property matters and a partner at Arent Fox LLP in Washington, D.C. However, Google may find itself liable to the infringement claims if Viacom proves that Google and YouTube didn't do all that was possible to prevent users from uploading copyrighted videos without permission, especially after being served with the DMCA notice last month, Klein said. Specifically, if YouTube and Google haven't implemented available technology that would allow them to do a better job of filtering out infringing videos, Viacom could have a legitimate argument in saying they're not trying hard enough, he said. A check of YouTube at noon Eastern time showed multiple instances of Viacom-owned videos, including clips from Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and from Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob SquarePants." One of the "SpongeBob" clips found, for example, has been on YouTube since Feb. 5 of this year, while one of "The Daily Show" clips was uploaded in October of last year. Google executives have said the company is developing technology to address the issue of infringing downloads on YouTube and have promised to deliver it in the near future. Google didn't immediately provide an explanation of what, if any, filtering and detection technology exists in YouTube today. In the meantime, competitorsÂ such asÂ News Corp.'s MySpace, which also lets users upload videos to its site, have licensed third-party systems for detecting infringing videos. There are a number of companies that make this type of software, including Audible Magic, the one chosen by MySpace.
383121
In yet another clash between tech titans, Microsoft is accusing Google of copyright infringement. Redmond claims Google's Book Search project robs publishers and authors of due profits by reprinting their content online for the world to view free of charge.
480648
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.
8646
The US Internet portal Google complied with a court order and posted on its Belgian websites a copyright ruling that went against the giant online information provider.
396099
(InfoWorld) - Media company Viacom said on Tuesday that it was filing suit against Google Inc. for what it alleges are "massive intentional copyright infringement" of Viacomâs property. Viacom is seeking more than $1 billion in damages and asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to place an injunction on Google and to prevent the company from sharing around 160,000 unauthorized video clips on the company's YouTube video sharing site, Viacom said in a statement. Google was not immediately available for comment. Viacom, which owns popular brands including MTV, Comedy Central, VH1 and Nickelodeon, said its programming had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times on YouTube, the video sharing site that Google purchased in October, 2006, for $1.6 billion. âYouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to othersâ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google," Viacom said in a statement.Â  "Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws." The suit by Viacom follows a notice from Viacom in February, 2007 under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to remove its videos from YouTube. Viacom alleges that Google does little to police copyright violations on YouTube. "This behavior stands in stark contrast to the actions of other significant distributors, who have recognized the fair value of entertainment content and have concluded agreements to make content legally available to their customers around the world," the company said. Shortly after buying YouTube in October, Google struck deals with Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group to offer music videos on YouTube and share advertising revenue. The company also negotiated with Viacom on a similar deal, but Viacom claims those negotiations were unproductive and that Google is following an "unlawful business model." "Therefore, we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused," Viacom said.