San Francisco — Xerox Corporation last week filed a patent infringement lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Delaware, accusing Google, Yahoo, owners of the two biggest U.S. search engines, and Google subsidiary YouTube of violating two Xerox patents associated with automatically-generated search queries and data integration.
One patent was granted in 2001 and another in 2004, the Xerox patents encompasses methods for integrating heterogeneous data and for automatically searching for related content. In question are U.S. Patents 6,778,979 and 6,236,994.
The document management and services company claims that Google has violated upon its patent “System for automatically generating searches” with its AdWords and AdSense software.
The suit, registered Feb. 19 in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware, also accuses that Yahoo Search Marketing, Yahoo Publisher Network and Y!Q Contextual Search infringe the patent and demands cash compensation and an order that would forbid Yahoo, Google and Google’s YouTube from further using the patented Xerox technology without permission.
Xerox also declares that the Google Maps, Google Video and Yahoo Shopping services all violate another Xerox patent, “Method and apparatus for the integration of information and knowledge from various sources,” which has to do with updating Web pages based on user reviews. Online video site YouTube.com infringes the same patent, Xerox alleges.
The inventions come from Xerox research into managing documents on the Web, said Bill McKee, a spokesman for the Norwalk, Connecticut-based company.
The document management company is demanding treble damages because it claims the defending companies are aware of its patents and that their infringement is willful.
“We have been in dialog with Google and Yahoo for some time about licensing these patents, without reaching a resolution,” McKee said in an e-mailed statement. “We believe we have no alternative but to file suit to properly protect our intellectual property.”
“Merit-Less”
Representatives of Yahoo and Google said they will fight the lawsuit.
Google’s senior litigation counsel Catherine Lacavera, said in an e-mail, “These claims are entirely baseless, and we will vigorously defend ourselves against them.”
Yahoo proposed a similar statement. “Yahoo does not believe we infringe and plans to fight this case,” a company spokesperson said via e-mail.
Google and Yahoo both backup the Coalition for Patent Fairness, a group that has been soliciting for patent reform argue that the patent system has not been amended since 1952 and have been trying for several years to rally support for legislation to change the patent system.
The most recent proposed legislation, the Patent Reform Act of 2009, has been sitting in committee in the Senate for almost a year.
The company is no alien to patent encounters. In 1997, Xerox sued a predecessor to Palm Inc. over the handheld’s Graffiti text-entry system. The battle eventually forced Palm to abandon Graffiti, and nine years later, Palm finally settled the suit, paying Xerox $22.5 million to license three Xerox patents.
The case is Xerox Corp. v. Google Inc., 10cv136, U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware (Wilmington).