WASHINGTON D.C. - Google's browser toolbar faces patent-infringement charges once again, as a federal court of appeals overturned part of a lower court's decision Wednesday.
The company's AdSense contextual-advertising service has been cleared of charges.
Hyperphrase Technologies filed the suit against Google in April 2006, alleging that Google's AdSense and the AutoLink toolbar function infringed claims in four Hyperphrase patents related to the presentation and contextual linking of information. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin rejected the allegations in a summary judgment in Google's favor. Hyperphrase appealed the decision.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's ruling Wednesday upheld the sections of the summary judgment related to AdSense and some of the claims against AutoLink, but overturned the section on AutoLink's alleged infringement of two of the patents. The Court of Appeals remanded the case to the District Court to be re-examined.
The Court of Appeals found that the District Court had considered an inappropriate interpretation for "data reference," 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 for a determination on whether AutoLink infringed the patents under the new interpretation that was suggested.
The Court of Appeals upheld the District Court's judgment regarding AdSense, agreeing that there is no use of a "data reference" - in the sense of the Hyperphrase patents at issue - in the way AdSense infers the topic of a Web page and links keywords that may not appear on the page to advertisements.
Google's latest quarterly financial report warns that the company is subject to intellectual-property-rights claims and may face more in the future.
One case - brought by Northeastern University in Boston and Jarg, a Massachusetts company that develops distributed search technologies - charges Google with infringing a patent 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.
