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Thu, 29 Oct 2009 Google hit with patent suit related to Chrome

Red Bend says that Google infringes on its patent

Nancy Gohring

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Israeli company Red Bend filed a lawsuit this week against Google, charging the search giant with infringing one of its patents.

The suit alleges that Google uses Red Bend's patented technology in Courgette, a method Google uses to compress updates and send them to its Chrome browser.

Courgette is a compression algorithm that Google developed to shrink the size of updates in order reduce bandwidth requirements for Google and its users, and also to reduce the potential for vulnerabilities, it says on a page describing the technology.

Filed in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the suit also charges Google with publishing and distributing the source code for Red Bend's technology.

That charge may stem from the fact that Chrome and the Courgette update system are open source.

Red Bend claims that Google has known about the patent, which Red Bend filed for in 1998 and was granted in 2003, since Sept. 7 this year. As a result, Red Bend is asking for triple damages and attorney's fees.

Google said it had not yet been served with the suit and therefore would not comment on it.

Red Bend, which also has offices in Waltham, Massachusetts, develops software management products primarily for the mobile phone industry.

Phone makers, operators and software developers use the products to manage and update their software on phones.

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ji_dd7 said on Thu, 29 Oct 2009

How can you patent an open source code?

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