Google Victorious Over Function Media Internet Advertising System Patents
| January 27, 2012
The PTO Board of Appeals handed Google an important victory today in its battle with Function Media over three Internet advertising patents – U.S. Patent Nos. 6,829,587, 7,240,025 and 7,249,059. Function Media sued Google and Yahoo! in the Eastern District of Texas in 2007, asserting that these patents were infringed on by “Google’s AdSense and AdWords technologies, Google Print Ads, and other products and services related to internet and print advertising.” Google replied to the suit in July 2008 by requesting inter partes reexamination of the patents.
This past September, after a jury trial, Magistrate Judge Everingham issued a judgment that two of the patents were not infringed and that all but four of the claims of the patents were invalid over the prior art. The judgment is now on appeal to the CAFC. (The third Function Media patent appears to have been dropped from the Texas case).
And today the Board compounded Google’s success in Texas by affirming prior art rejections of all the Function Media claims in reexamination.