Google To Pay Vringo Royalties From AdWords Revenue

Google has been ordered to pay I/P Engine, a patent licensing subsidiary of Vringo, the royalty rate of 6.5% on a part of AdWords revenue. The lawsuit dates back to September 2011, when I/P Engine filed a complaint against AOL, Google, Target and others, alleging that they infringed two of its patents through the AdWords search advertising platform.

The judgment comes from Judge Raymond A. Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Norfolk division, per Computer World.

Google earlier argued it had redesigned AdWords to remove the function related to the I/P Engine patent -- so if royalties were warranted, it should pay a lump sum, per the judgment. The court decided the "new AdWords was nothing more than a colorable variation of the old AdWords."

In 2011, Vringo bought patents from the search engine Lycos. The company transferred them to Innovate/Protect, its patent-holding subsidiary, and used them to sue Google, AOL, and others. Patent number 6,314,420 describes a search engine system that makes searches for information entities that provide a threshold to match user queries.

The Vringo-owned patent for the search engine system also offers a collaborative/content-based filter to make continuing searches for information that match existing queries and are ranked and stored. A user feedback system provides collaborative feedback data for integration with content profile data in the operation of the collaborative/content-based filter. A query processor determines whether a demand search or a wire search is made for an input query.

The second patent 6,775,664 elaborates on a user feedback system that integrates with content profile data where a query determines whether the demand for the information in the search is made for an input query.

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