Google Sued over the Courgette Algorithm Used in Chrome

Lawsuits are a fact of life for large companies and they don't get any more common than patent lawsuits and all-time favorite for companies large and small. Patent laws are already widely disputed as being abused and this even more true for software patents, which most engineers would agree have very little factual grounds. That doesn't make them any less real and Google is getting hit with another lawsuit over a very interesting piece of technology named Courgette, used to decrease the size of Chrome updates.

Now Red Bend, a mobile phone software company, is suing Google over the technology claiming it infringes on a patent it held since April 2003. According to the company the patent, titled “Difference extraction between two versions of data-tables containing intra-references,” was filed over 10 years ago and is based around a way of making software program updates smaller by creating a difference between the new and the old version.

At heart the idea is a very good one, by only by including the changes to a piece of software the download size can drop significantly. Google also thought so when it introduced the technology over summer and boasted that the algorithm it had devised could significantly decrease the size of software updates offering much better results than the other “diff” algorithms out there. Because there are other such tools using the very same concept to get update sizes down.

Precisely because it is a good idea, many have implemented it in one form or another. So why did it take until Google rolled out the technology before Red Bend decided to sue people for patent infringement? Very simple, Google is loaded with cash, open-source projects, not so much. Of course, Google's Chromium project is also open source and so is the Courgette algorithm. It's unclear if the mobile software company has a real case. If Google's method is indeed very similar to the one patented by the company, it may have a shot. If however, the company is suing solely on the broad concept of a differential software updating system, it would be yet another case of a company abusing a faulty patent system hoping for some financial gain.