Where other tech giants have caved in and reached negotiated agreements with a dreaded patent troll over push notifications, Google fought, lost big, fought some more and finally won. The prize? Eighty-five million dollars – money an East Texas court had ordered Google to pay.
Google s victory took place in the U.S. Court of Appeals, where the firm faced off against SimpleAir, a company that exists to file lawsuits over claimed infringements of patents it owns.
SimpleAir describes itself not as a patent troll but as an inventor-owned technology licensing company with interests and intellectual property in the wireless content delivery, mobile application, and push notification market spaces.
In this case, SimpleAir alleged that Google s Cloud Messenger services infringed on a 1996 patent for pushing content onto desktop computers. Current push notifications typically involve messages sent from an app to a user s interface even when the app isn t running.
From 2008 to 2013, SimpleAir filed lawsuits against Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, MySpace and CBS over the notifications, website Ars Technica reported. Those firms settled with the patent troll, and in early proceedings in the Google lawsuit, a SimpleAir expert testified that Microsoft had probably paid $5 million to licence a SimpleAir push patent, according to the website.
SimpleAir had sued Google in District of East Texas federal court, a jurisdiction notoriously friendly to patent trolls. In 2014, SimpleAir was awarded $85 million from Google. But Google took the case to federal appeals court, and on April 1, the court ruled that Google did not infringe on SimpleAir s patent, and threw out the $85 million judgment.
Photo: The Google logo (KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images)
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