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Google vs Hyperphrase – Still no Winner
By Robert | January 9, 2008
The War between Google and Hyperphrase Technologies is still going on although Google did gain one victory. The bad news for them is that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit only upheld Google’s request of summary judgment in a partial note while remanding a part of the case for reconsideration. For those that are not aware, this is just the latest round of a battle that started in 2006. The two companies are fighting over who owns the intellectual property that stands behind the AutoLink feature you can notice in Google Toolbar. Hyperphrase Technologies sued Google for patent infringement and Google responded with filing for summary judgment in November 2006. After receiving it in December, Hyperphrase did not agree and appealed it. The result is both companies going back into district court to re-examine AutoLink.
In order to understand this patent case you need to hold basic knowledge of how AdSense and AutoLink work. Those that have Google Toolbar know that AutoLink is included and is a tool that scans a loaded web page and identifies certain character strings. If it detects something that seems to bee a valid character string, it will link it to a relevant URL. AdSense also scans the web page and analyzes it. It then cross-references the keywords found with the keywords in the advertising database and then the results are re-analyzed in order to select with advertisement should be displayed. The original district court ruling stated that AdSense does not infringe HyperPhrase’s patents. On the other hand, the topic at hand still remains AutoLink and at the rate the current battle is going, who knows when a positive answer (and final) will be released? With all the appeal and re-appeals possible, we might as well simply use AutoLink and wait till it might disappear from the toolbar.
Topics: On The Web |
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