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Google fights patent claims

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-02-19 07:54

The Google Inc logo is displayed at a news conference in Taipei. Bloomberg News

Google Inc is going on the offensive to fight patent claims, a strategy the Internet-search company says will deter frivolous lawsuits.

The number of patent challenges against Google rose to 14 last year, from 11 in 2007 and three in 2006. The company wants to curb that growth by fighting rather than settling lawsuits, said Catherine Lacavera, Google's senior litigation counsel.

"I would love to say we're seeing a leveling off of patent filings," Lacavera said in an interview. "It's our hope this will serve as a deterrent."

Google, which currently has 24 patent cases pending, didn't settle any patent challenges last year, after resolving cases in each of the previous four years, according to federal court dockets.

It's a risky strategy, said Alan Fisch, a patent lawyer at Kaye Scholer in Washington. Fighting cases in court, an approach pursued by Microsoft Corp and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., can result in verdicts costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Settling patent fights is often a smarter solution, avoiding drawn-out cases and legal fees.

"If you're going to take a hard-line approach, you'd better back it up with victories," said Fisch, who doesn't represent Google or its opponents.

So far, Google is winning, said Hilary Ware, Google's managing litigation counsel. The Mountain View, California-based company has fought and won five patent suits filed against it since starting the more aggressive policy two years ago, Ware said.

"It's really beginning to pay off as a litigation strategy," Ware said in an interview. "We're just seeing the fruits of our labors now."

Google's strategy will lead to more litigation, not less, said Raymond Niro, a lawyer for HyperPhrase Technologies LLC. The company said in 2006 that Google infringed a patent owned by HyperPhrase in a Web browser tool-bar feature called AutoLink, which suggests Web addresses based on users' past search queries. After defeating the challenge, Google is now asking for $500,000 as compensation for legal costs. "The typical reaction of litigation-oriented attorneys is there's no sense talking to Google, you might as well just sue them," Niro said. "They want to project a very aggressive approach to litigation."

Wisconsin-based HyperPhrase challenged the request for fees, saying Google won only on a "notoriously unpredictable" interpretation of the patent and indulged in "impermissible hindsight" in arguing that HyperPhrase should have given up the fight.

In October, a judge in Norfolk, Virginia, ruled that Google's AdWords feature didn't infringe a patent for online bidding owned by Bid for Position LLC of Boca Raton, Florida. The case in on appeal.

Agencies

(China Daily 02/19/2009 page16)