Google Toolbar Back In Trouble

Berlin (dbtechno) – Google’s latest in a long series of court battles concerning patent infringement is not going well for the computer giant.

Last week the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the browser toolbar featured in Google’s Toolbar add on is guilty of an infringement on a patent. A lower court had found previously that the toolbar was new content and not guilty of any copyright or patient infringement.

In another ruling, the AdSense advertising service, which is also part of the Google browser add-on, was found to be free of any infringement.

The firm Hyperphase Technologies went to court and filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming that they had four patents that were being infringed upon. Their lawsuit claimed that the Auto link and AdSense elements of Google’s add on download for the Internet Explorer brower was partly based on their products.

In 2006 the U.S. District Court in Wisconsin turned the lawsuit down, but when appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals the Auto link portion was overturn.

The Court of Appeals overturned the issues that dealt with the Auto link segment of the case. They found in Hyperphase’s favor, and returned the Auto link part of the case to the District Court to be looked at again.

Auto link takes Web pages and searches for different text and text fragments. It then will use these bits of text to suggest sites and web pages on the World Wide Web that it thinks matches these bits of text. This is a process pioneered by Hyperphase, and so they sued to protect their interests.

The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the District Court failed to properly consider the term “Data Reference,” and that there ruling was incorrect partly because of this. The text bits form this “Data Reference” and it’s the ability of a program to associate and create the click-able links that Hyperphase was instrumental in helping create, and its that ability and patent they wish to protect.

While similar to an earlier Microsoft Inc. process called “Smart Tags,” the process by Hyperphase is notably different.

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