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's core business, according to court filings.
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Oracle Corp. said Monday it will drop a lawsuit it filed in Delaware against PeopleSoft, its rival and takeover target, if a majority of PeopleSoft
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American Blinds & Wallpaper Factory Inc. has dropped trademark infringement lawsuit against Google after a four-year fight.
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Court sends patent suit back to lower court in case over Google's AutoLink toolbar feature.
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An independent report filed on  Friday in an Arkansas court sided with Google over disgruntled  advertisers who had sued the search engine giant accusing it of  trying to drive up fees through so-called click fraud.
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A trademark infringement suit against Google may alter how the search industry makes a profit.
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A lawsuit accusing Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief strategist of illegally intercepting e-mails has been withdrawn and the legal battle between him and former associates has been resolved, the parties said Wednesday.
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A state court in Hamburg on Tuesday rejected a German company's lawsuit against Google Inc. over allegations the Internet search engine allows rival companies to buy ads using trademarked terms, an attorney said Tuesday.
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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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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 civil suit filed in Florida by Dell and its Alienware subsidiary is giving insight into the enormous sums of money that can be made by creating Web pages full of advertising links.In October, Dell sued a group of domain registrars, alleging the companies bought more than 1,100 domain names with trademark-infringing characteristics, such as &quot;dellbatterrogram.com&quot; in order to put advertising links on the pages.The practice, known as&#160;typosquatting, is illegal. It&#39;s intended to draw unwitting Web surfers to pages with URLs (uniform resource locators) that are similar to legitimate sites, and then redirect them to other sites. The owners of these Web sites get revenue from advertising referral programs every time a link is clicked.The defendants -- Belgiumdomains, Capitoldomains, Domaindoorman, Netrian Ventures, iHoldings.com, Juan Pablo Vazquez, and 10 unnamed defendants -- deny the claims. Dell contends the businesses, most of which are registered outside the U.S., are shell companies engaged in collusion.Dell sought a court order in November to freeze their assets so the money from their operations wouldn&#39;t disappear. Last month, the court amended the freeze order, and contained in the details of the new order are clues to just how much money the defendants may be raking in.Google, whose AdSense advertising-placement program was used to monetize the domains, was ordered to hold in a special account the first $1 million collected on behalf of the defendants each month. The second $1 million that accrues in the account every month will be given to the defendants. If more than $2 million accrues in one month, the money is split between the defendants and the Google account.Google takes a cut of AdSense revenue, which shows that it in part benefits from this kind of abuse of the Internet. However, Google recently announced it will not allow AdSense campaigns on &quot;kited&quot; domains.Kiting is a technique used by some rogue registrars to avoid having to pay the fee for using a domain. The domain is repeatedly registered and unregistered within a five-day Add-Grace Period. The grace period, which applies to a handful of TLDs (Top Level Domains) was intended to let people get a refund of their domain registration fee if they made a spelling mistake.Kiting often goes hand in hand with another abusive practice, &quot;domain tasting.&quot; A domain name is registered and monitored during the grace period to see if it gets sufficient traffic to pay for its registration fee. The domain owners then get refunds on the sites with low traffic. However, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers&#160;(ICANN) is considering keeping a $0.20 fee&#160;it normally refunds as part of the registration process in order to stop tasting.Dell has accused the typosquatter defendants in its lawsuit of both practices and is claiming their profits as well as $100,000 per infringing domain used.Google&#39;s antikiting policy doesn&#39;t apply to domain tasting, meaning the company will still potentially benefit from Web sites intended merely for advertising. A Google spokesman said Tuesday, however, that Web sites are supposed to have legitimate content in order to be accepted into AdSense.Other information in the court documents shed light on the economics of monetizing domain names. Dell contends the defendants control some 1 million domain names, and believes they also have used at least 64 million other unique domain names.When the court froze the defendants&#39; assets in November, it also froze their ability to stop renewing domain names that weren&#39;t producing enough revenue to justify the registration fees. Since the defendants controlled so many domain names, the automatic renewal of those names -- likely around 3,000 domains a day -- cost them $20,000 per day.However, the defendants successfully petitioned the court to cancel domains that were generating less than $8 a year in revenue.&quot;These [figures] tell us that there&#39;s lots of money in tasting, and it&#39;s a game of huge volume,&quot; wrote John Levine, a consultant and author of &quot;The Internet for Dummies&quot; on his blog.The Dell case continues in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.&#160;
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One of the three women suing the University of Colorado for what they said was the school&#39;s failure to protect them against sexual assault by football players has dropped her federal lawsuit.
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Google Inc. won a major legal victory yesterday when a federal judge ruled that the search engine's advertising policy does not violate federal trademark laws.
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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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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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A United States appeals court upheld a finding of patent infringement against Research In Motion Ltd. yesterday, but struck down part of the ruling and sent it back to a lower court for further proceedings.
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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.