Patent Troll Sues Google, AOL Over Search 'Snippets' and Ad Serving Tech

First time accepted submitter WindyWonka writes "Google and AOL were sued for patent infringement Thursday, accused of violating two former British Telecom patents via Google's search 'snippets' and by Google AdSense and Advertising.com ad serving technology. Incredibly, the lawsuit by apparent patent troll Suffolk Technologies asserts that every Google search result 'snippet' display violates one patent, and that another really broad server patent is violated every time Google and AOL serve up ads."

Comments

Funding?

[andydread]

Who is behind the funding of this Patent Troll?

Re:Funding?

[stevew]

I looked at the Server patent - it essentially patents download files via the web. It is bogus beyond all recognition! It was filed in 2000 - I would imagine that gopher, or some of the other earlier web technologies take care this patent nicely, i.e.. prior art exist in spades.

Re:Funding?

[Anonymous Coward]

This appears to be British Telecom - aka BT, the main telecoms provider in the UK. They are a huge organisation that got broken up into smaller separate business units for wholesale, business, retail (internet phone) and network maintenance. They have a large 2000-3000 person R&D (at least there used to be lots of R&D there are few years back, but I'm not so sure now) center at Adastral Park in the county of *Suffolk* (just south of Cambridge/Cambridgeshire in the East of England). I assume either BT has setup Suffolk Technologies, or someone close to them has bought the patents to pursue. If it is BT then it will be a well-funded operation.

I think the broad server patent is rubbish. But, the snippet patent IMHO is a legitimate patent.

Re:Funding?

[Sepodati]

I think the difference is in incorporating an "identfiication signal" in the original request that is then processed and determines the file to return. So it's not just requesting "foo.txt" and returning it. But, I would think any program that processes GET or POST data and returns a file based on those "identification signals" would be a violation or prior art for this "invention".

Re:Funding?

[Qzukk]

The patent covers using the page the request was made from to decide what file you should get. The original patent was filed in the UK in April 1996 and discusses the HTTP protocol and the referrer address, but RFC 1945 was published a month later and defined the HTTP protocol (including the misspelling of referer). Perhaps this information was added to the US version of the patent when it was filed in March 1997.

This seems like something they could get a few bucks each out of the various blogs that forbid hotlinking by serving up goatse whenever the referer URL for a picture is some other site. But I guess they can get more than a few bucks out of Google and AOL, even if it's not really clear how they infringe on the patent.

Re:Funding?

[rtfa-troll]

So yeah, my apache anti-leaching script in the 90s (That substituted a photo of an erect dick whenever an image was leached) was a total patent thievery acomplished via time-travel or something.

Did you publish it? If so, push the link to Google's lawyers (dropping it on an anti-patent site like Groklaw will do, if you don't want to talk directly to Google). Everyone will appreciate that. It might seem stupid, but it can be really hard to find examples of obvious ideas from the distant past.

Enough already

[Anonymous Coward]

This never-ending series of X sues Y articles bores the shit out of me. Constantly presenting them implies the average technology reader does, or should, have an abiding interest in these corporate hijinks, these capitalist dick-length spats, the outcomes of which are of concern chiefly to powerful, monied interests and their lawyers.

The degree to which our attention is focused on this garbage shows how much our souls are being sucked dry. Science, math, even technology offers much more than this kind of crap.

Re:Enough already

[MrLint]

You sir/madam are overly optimistic.

Re:Patents

[geminidomino]

That's not the problem. Patents already do expire in X number of years.

The problem is twofold:

1. "X" is an eternity in an industry where "obsolete" means "more than six months old"

2. The patents are being granted on utter bullshit 'inventions,' bogus 'business processes,' and algorithms, and are not properly researched or vetted before being rubber stamped.

Your solution really doesn't solve anything.

Re:Lawyers

[viperidaenz]

But there are so many of them they'll increase the sea levels... unless the increased mass pushes the sea floor down further making the oceans deeper...