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24 June 2015Patents

US Supreme Court rejects Google’s petition to hear Street View patent case

The US Supreme Court has refused to hear a dispute concerning allegations that Google’s Street View service infringes four patents owned by technology company Vederi.

In its decision on Monday, June 22, the Supreme Court ruled that the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit had not erred in its decision to send the case back to the US District Court for the District of California for a full trial.

The decision means that the lawsuit will now return to the California district court, despite the fact it previously accepted Google’s motion for summary judgement that it had not infringed Vederi’s patents.

At the centre of the dispute are four patents owned by Vederi.

In 2010, the company sued Google claiming that its Street View service, which allows users to navigate panoramic views of roads and streets, had infringed its patents.

Two years later, the California district court granted Google’s motion for a summary judgment and ruled that it had not infringed the patents in question.

The four patents cover a method of transferring images onto a computer and enabling users to navigate them.

Under dispute is a claim that appears in all four patents which describes the images created as being able to “substantially” show “elevations” in a geographic area.

Google said that the words “substantially” and “elevations” should only cover flat images because the phrase was an amendment of a previous patent claim centred on “non-aerial images” which was originally rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Vederi then amended the claims to include the phrases “substantially” and “elevations”, after which the applications were accepted.

Google said that the amendments to the applications should be “construed as narrowly as possible” and that the patents should only cover “vertical flat depictions”.

The district court agreed prompting Vederi to appeal against the decision to the federal circuit.

The federal circuit said that Vederi’s patent claims do cover “curved or spherical images”, and that a trial should determine whether Google’s Street View service infringed Vederi’s patents.

Despite Google’s request, the Supreme Court upheld the federal circuit’s decision.

The case had also attracted the interest of the US Department of Justice (DoJ).

In an amicus brief filed at the Supreme Court in May, the DoJ argued that the amended claims did not amount to a “clear and unambiguous disavowal of spherical or curved images”.

Google had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication, but we will update the story should the company get in touch. Vederi could not be reached for comment.

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