Google AdWords cleared of patent infringement
Google’s AdWords advertising system does not infringe a patent owned by a geotagging company, a US court has ruled.
The search engine has been cleared following a case at the US District Court for the District of Delaware that saw technology companies Google and Microsoft join forces against GeoTag Inc.
District Judge Richard Andrews ruled the patent had not been infringed but denied requests to deem it invalid.
Geotagging is the process of adding geographical metadata to media including photographs, videos and websites while AdWords is a Google feature that lets customers display adverts alongside certain search terms.
The dispute started in 2011 when the tech companies claimed in a lawsuit that GeoTag had used a patent it owns (US number 5,930,474) to file lawsuits against more than 300 companies, many of which were Microsoft and Google’s customers.
In the initial complaint, it said the customers were sued for using Google Maps and Bing Maps (Microsoft’s mapping service) for services including store locators.
In a counterclaim, GeoTag claimed the companies and Google’s AdWords system infringed several claims of the patent, including claim 1, which related to a search engine “in communication” with a database.
Microsoft and Google then moved to seek a judgment of non-infringement to get the patent invalidated.
In the judgment, Google claimed it did not infringe several aspects of claim 1, including a broader geographical area replicated into at least one narrower geographical search area.
Google and GeoTag have been contacted for comment.
