14 DAY TRIAL // It was probably only a matter of time – Google and a bunch of Android phone makers are being sued by Rockstar Bidco, the shell company that won the Nortel patent portfolio a couple of years ago. Rockstar is owned primarily by Microsoft and Apple and paid $4.5 billion (€3.3 billion) for the patent stock, bidding Google out of the race.
Now, Google may be thinking that it should have put up a couple of hundreds of millions more to win that bid war.
The lawsuit against Google focuses on seven patents, all related and titled "associative search engine." With thousands of Nortel patents to choose from, it's interesting that Rockstar went for something quite close to home for Google, namely search.
Obviously, any sane person would realize that any lawsuit against Google over search technology is ridiculous, as the company has been defining what search means for a decade and a half now. But court decisions don't align themselves to common sense as often as you'd think.
The oldest patent in the seven wielded by Rockstar dates from 1997, one year before Google was incorporated.
The patent describes an "advertisment machine which provides advertisements to a user searching for desired information within a data network." Basically, it describes how a search engine would serve contextual ads based on what people searched for.
It's how AdWords works and how every other search engine with ads works. The "invention" is so generic that "obvious" doesn't really describe it. Showing ads that are relevant to the query next to the results isn't an invention, it's common sense.
Google has plenty of search engine patents of its own. In fact, that's what most of the patents it filed focus on. But that's no guarantee that it will win. In fact, regardless of what happens, it is going to take years and many tens of millions of dollars for lawyers to settle this.