Lawsuit Against Google, Yahoo, Amazon, AOL. Wow, He's Really Fearless!

Patent company Polaris is suing numerous Internet companies under the pretext that they infringed one of its patents. Among the firms which will go the judge, I can mention Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ask.com and some others. According to Miguel Helft from The New York Times, Polaris claims that all these companies infringed the United States Patent No. 6,411,947, formerly named "Automatic message interpretation and routing system". Actually, Polaris sustains that Google's advertising platforms, the famous AdSense and AdWords, are working on a technology based on its patent while Yahoo and the other mentioned firms also infringe the patent.

Obviously, this is quite a crazy move because it's extremely hard to fight against all these Internet giants such as Yahoo, Google or Ask.com. As you're probably thinking, it might represent a new Polaris move to obtain some cash from the famous companies as all of them are well known for their financial power.

But it seems like this is not the first time when Polaris tries something like this. As the New York Times employee wrote, the same patent owner filed a complaint in 2006 against Kana Software, accusing it of infringing the patent. What's most interesting is that Kana agreed to pay a certain amount of money to settle the lawsuit but no official statement was made.

Here is the 'Abstract' part of the patent that might be infringed by the Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo or Ask.com:

A method for automatically interpreting an electronic message, including the steps of:
(a) receiving the electronic message from a source;
(b) interpreting the electronic message using a rule base and case base knowledge engine and
(c) classifying the electronic message as at least one of (i) being able to be responded to automatically; and (ii) requiring assistance from a human operator. The method for automatically interpreting an electronic message may also include the step of retrieving one or more predetermined responses corresponding to the interpretation of the electronic message from a repository for automatic delivery to the source.