Google Toolbar back in court after partial remand

While it looked like Google could walk away from a potentially damaging infringement case against its browser-based Toolbar, a district court judge found the reasoning behind a full Google victory may have been flawed.

On the day after Christmas, a Wisconsin appeals court judge ruled that a portion of a patent infringement decision in favor of defendant Google may be in error. At issue is an interpretation of how the underlying database technology should work when an add-in application enables extra hyperlinks in a Web page other than those already hard-coded into the page.

The phrase at issue is "reference," used interchangeably with "data reference." A company called Hyperphrase sued Google last year, claiming that the underlying technology in the AutoLink feature of Google Toolbar, and certain features of Google's AdSense text-based advertising services, infringed on as many as fifteen claims. On December 20 of last year, a district court granted Google's motion for summary judgment, effectively dismissing all of Hyperphrase's claims.

But on appeal, Judge John C. Shibaz considered whether one of the district court's conclusions was inaccurate, specifically whether an item of data capable of being linked to more than one database record, was not, by definition, a "data reference."

"The unmistakable meaning of these terms," the district court ruled last year, "is that there be a reference to a single, specific record which the created link retrieves." Thus, a patent in Hyperphrase's portfolio that enables a browser add-in to recognize a Social Security number, for example, based on its xxx-xx-xxxx format, and communicate with an outside database capable of filling in the identity of the person referenced by that number, might not have been infringed by Google, the district court ruled. The reason, it claimed, was because Google's servers were capable of filling in that information with data from more than one source, not just a "single, specific record."

One of Hyperphrase's own patents did define "data reference" this way: "a unique phrase or word which may be used in a record to refer to another record or record segment."

"The district court's error," reads Judge Shiraz' ruling yesterday, "was in going beyond this explicit definition to hold that a data reference may only refer to one and only one possible record." To back up that finding, the judge cited another of Hyperphrase's own patents which clearly omits the appearance of referring to a single record source.

"We hold that the correct construction is 'a unique phrase or word which may be used in a record to refer to another record or record segment,' and that a data reference may refer to one or more than one record," Judge Shiraz continued.

As a result, the summary judgment for Google in the AutoLink portion of Hyperphrase's case was unraveled. It now gets remanded to a district court for reconsideration. The part of the district court summary judgment that cleared AdSense, however, stands.

From the standpoint of database logic, Judge Shiraz' decision changes everything. A one-to-one correspondence and an open-ended reference are entirely different mechanisms, as can be supported by anyone who has ever designed even the simplest relational database. The differences are night and day to a database developer, and this time around, the appeals court judge saw things the same way.