New York — Hardly a day passes by when search engine giant is not tangled in some or the other copyright disputes — and now it seems that Google is now facing yet another patent lawsuit. A Russian search company “Era Vodoleya,” that competes with Google, is suing Google for a massive $3 Billion copyright infringement of the company’s alleged contextual advertising technology, claims that it holds an old patent on contextual advertising in Russia, which is the key to Google’s money-making machine and a team of Russian developers, according to the technology blog Profy.
The center of dispute is AdSense. The Russian company “Era Vodoleya” (translated into English as “The Age of Aquarius”) claims that they had their intellectual property involved in contextual advertising patented dating back to one year before Google began using this technology and started offering its services in the country — and eventually earned tons of advertising revenue since then. And this prompted the Russian company to take the matter to court now, to claim those earnings which should have been theirs.
“This is the first time that the search giant has been the subject of far-flung allegations over copyright infringement.”
According to the CEO of the Russian company as quoted by the the Russian CNews branch (in Russian) stated that the technology of displaying ads related to content of a web page was invented by his company, and they have been carefully investigating the matter for some five years, and now finally say that Google has copied their technology, leaving other Russian search engines using the technology alone.
The irony is that the top brass from the development company does not intend to sue Russian search engines using the same technology as Google does: from the very beginning they have decided to choose the most lucrative target of all — which is obviously Google. Ero Vadeleya said that those companies developed their own technologies based on Google’s idea.
Interestingly, the official amount of damages claimed has not been announced yet and will need to be determined by experts prior to filing the lawsuit but for now it is reported to be in the range of $3 billion — or 15% of Google’s profit. Nevertheless, there are also reports that the company is open for negotiation with Google and may not push through with the lawsuit should they reached an amicable settlement with Google. Unfortunately for the company, Google seemed to be ignoring them.
The big trouble from Google’s point of view: Russia is the country in which its acquisition of “Begun,” an online advertising company, was reportedly in talks with Google over a potential £70 million takeover, appeared to hit a snag. Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service stopped the deal by citing some incomplete paperwork, but there are rumors that no matter how many trees Google kills, the acquisition will remain stopped due to competition concerns.
Earlier this year LimitNone lodged a complaint charging that the company copied code from a tool that migrated contact data from Microsoft Outlook to GMail. The firm has also been sued in the past over the VoIP technology that underpins Google Talk.
Because of the growing number of patent lawsuits filed in recent years, Google and several other large technology companies including Cisco and HP joined together to form the Allied Security Trust. This organization buys up key intellectual property to prevent smaller companies filing legal complaints.
Google was unavailable for comment.