14 DAY TRIAL // Google's moneymaker is threatened by a lawsuit that will turn into a legal battle of epic proportions, should the claims turn out to be true. Microsoft's adCenter is also in danger, but for the Redmond-based company it wouldn't be such a bust as it does not derive 99 percent of its revenue from its advertising platform.
Liberty Township, Ohio-based Paid Search Engine Tools, filed a lawsuit claiming that both the above mentioned platforms violated patent number 7,043,450 "Paid Search Engine Bid Management" that was granted on the ninth of May, 2006. Almost five years have passed since the moment it was filed, December 20th, 2002 until it was registered, in which time the two giants have had the time to develop a similar concept.
Yahoo!'s ad platform was the first to be targeted by PSET, six months ago, on the 13th of September 2007. The Sunnyvale-based company asked the court to invalid Paid Search Engine's patent and dismiss the lawsuit. Yahoo! has been involved before in this kind of legal action when it sued Google over its paid search platform, which was settled just before the Mountain View-based company went public, in August 2004.
J. Robert Chambers, PSET's attorney, said that the patent was for a method of optimizing keyword bids, according to Online Media Daily, and that the firm he represented used to provide this type of services to marketers. The three Internet giants cut into his client's business when they started offering them and it was an insupportable situation and action had to be taken.
Following a trend of filing the lawsuits in IT patent plaintiff-friendly venues, Paid Search Engine Tools filed its case against Google and Microsoft in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division. The previous time Google was sued for patent infringement was over the way it pulled data from its databases, a case put together by Northeastern University associate professor Kenneth P. Baclawski.