University Sues Google Over Patent
Google has been sued by a university and a start-up company in the U.S. for allegedly infringing on a patented technology to run its online search service. The suit was filed by Boston's Northeastern University and by Jarg, a private company in Waltham, Mass., that specializes in distributed search technologies and one of whose cofounders, Kenneth Baclawski, is an associate professor at Northeastern.The suit accuses Google of using a distributed database technology developed by Baclawski in its online service. The lawsuit seeks a jury trial and an injunction to prevent Google from further infringing on the patent, as well as royalty payments and damages. The patent describes a distributed database system that breaks search queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster results. The patent was assigned to Northeastern University, which licensed it exclusively to Jarg, according to the lawsuit, filed last Tuesday with the U.S. District Co...