14 DAY TRIAL // As of late, Google has been dealing with an increasing wave of lawsuits filed against it because of the content on the video hosting property YouTube. The latest legal action initiated against the Mountain View based search giant comes from GraphOn, an application developer that claims that Google infringed its patent copyrights. Google Base, Google Blogger, Google Sites, and YouTube are cited as the websites that make use of four of the patents from the portfolio of intellectual property of GraphOn.
The disputed patents bear the numbers 538, 940, 034 and 591, and all of them are behind GraphOn's "unique method of maintaining an automated and network-accessible database," as the company explains.
"The number of patents now owned by GraphOn as a result of the NES [Network Egineering Software] acquisition has increased to twenty three, a number that is expected to continue to increase as patent applications on file at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office mature into issued patents," said Robert Dilworth, GraphOn's chief executive officer. "Aggressively protecting the technology represented in these patents is an important part of maximizing their value to GraphOn."
The server-based application producer says that the purpose of the lawsuit is that of forcing the search giant to stop using the four patents. Other damages may also be sought, but have not been specified yet.
This is not the first time when GrapOn goes against, by legal means, famous companies that are said to have infringed certain copyrights of the company. Yahoo!, AutoTrader.com, Juniper Networks, Classified Ventures, IAC/InterActiveCorp, Match.com, eHarmony.com and CareerBuilder have also been targeted in the past, as part of GraphOn's attempt to rehabilitate its rights.
Out of all these, only one case was solved amicably. The lawsuit filed in November 2005 against AutoTrader.com, which seemed to have infringed copyrights of the same 538 and 940 patents related to the Google case, was dismissed when the two parties reached an agreement. After the automotive online trader decided to buy the rights to use the two technologies, GraphOn dropped all charges against it.