Google in Copyright Infringement Row

Internet giant Google Inc. is being sued in an area where it could potentially hurt the most – the technology it is using for its Web search system. On November 6, Boston’s Northeastern University and Jarg Corp, a start-up that a professor from the university launched, filed papers against Google for a patent rights infringement on the search method.

Northeastern University and Jarg Corp filed the papers in Marshall, in the Eastern District of Texas. That could assume some significance if one took into account the fact that the U.S. court here has been known to hand out decisions mostly favoring the party filing the appeal.

If the decision goes in favor of the plaintiffs, Google could be hit quite hard, considering the company derives 99 percent of its revenues from online advertising generated as a result of keyword searches that Google users do to locate websites and other related links.

Jarg Corp patented the search technology in 1997, one year before Google was incorporated, and holds an exclusive license for it. The president and co-founder of Jarg, Michael Belanger, said his company had been aware of the copyright violation by Google for quite a while now. Belanger said Northeastern University joined in as a plaintiff once Jarg was able to get legal representation.

Belanger said they could not file the lawsuit earlier because they did not have the resources to push the case forward. Now it has on its side a law firm that has agreed to take up the case on a contingency-fee basis.

The law firm in question is Vinson & Elkins, a global legal firm with headquarters in Texas. The firm would be providing the lawyers to fight Jarg Corp’s case, and would receive legal help locally from counsel in Marshall and nearby Tyler.

The focus of the lawsuit against Google is U.S. Patent Number 5,694,593. Titled Distributed Computer Database System and Method, the patent was awarded to an assistant professor in the computer science department of Northeastern University, Dr. Kenneth Baclawski, for his invention. Baclawski is the co-founder of Jarg, which has its base in Waltham, Massachusetts.

While Jarg itself was incorporated in 1998, court documents revealed Dr. Baclawski had first published his work, related to searching and retrieving information from large distributed databases as far back as in 1994.

According to the suit that the plaintiffs have filed, Google never took legal opinion to check if it was in violation of the patent awarded to Dr. Baclawski. The suit goes on to request the court to award damages and royalty payments and also sought a jury trial as well as an injunction to stop further infringement of the patent.

Belanger said all they were looking for was to be paid for the use of their intellectual property. They were not filing suit to finish Google off as a business, he said. According to Belanger, they were just interested in a ‘normal royalty’ in the event the court is able to determine the technology Google was using was what the plaintiffs had created.

In a statement issued in response to the lawsuit, Google spokesman Jon Murchison said they had not yet received notice regarding the lawsuit, but knew about the complaint and believed it had no merit.