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Tag: Google Patents

  • Google and Samsung to Share Patents

    Google and Samsung to Share Patents

    The years-long legal fight between Apple and Samsung is continuing to rage in courts around the world. Other high-profile patent lawsuits have come and gone in recent years, creating an uneasy climate in which tech companies are now engaging in an expensive patent-gathering cold war.

    This situation has led to surprising developments in recent years, including massive patent cross-licensing agreements between industry competitors. Now, two of the biggest tech companies in the world have combined forces to establish a solid position in the patent wars.

    Today Samsung and Google announced that they have entered into a patent agreement. The arrangement is being described as a “long-term cooperative partnership” in which the two companies will share their patent portfolios. According to Google and Samsung, the deal will allow both companies to collaborate more closely in the future.

    “This agreement with Google is highly significant for the technology industry,” said Seungho Ahn, head of the Intellectual Property Center at Samsung. “Samsung and Google are showing the rest of the industry that there is more to gain from cooperating than engaging in unnecessary patent disputes.”

    Under the terms of the agreement, Google and Samsung will cross-license each company’s patents for both technology and business applications. In addition to the cross-licensing of existing patents, the new deal also covers patents that Google and Samsung will file over the next 10 years.

    “We’re pleased to enter into a cross-license with our partner Samsung,” said Allen Lo, deputy general counsel for patents at Google. “By working together on agreements like this, companies can reduce the potential for litigation and focus instead on innovation.”

    Image via Samsung

  • Google Patents Adds Patents From More Countries

    Google announced today that it has expanded Google Patents to include documents from agencies in China, Germany, Canada and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Obviously, this greatly increases the coverage breadth of Google’s patent search engine.

    “Many of these documents may provide prior art for future patent applications, and we hope their increased discoverability will improve the quality of patents in the U.S. and worldwide,” says Google engineering manager Jon Orwant. “So if you want to learn about a Chinese dual-drive bicycle, a German valve for inflating bicycle tires, attach a Canadian trailer to your bike, or read the WIPO application for pedalling with one leg, those and millions of other inventions are now available on Google Patents.”

    “Thanks to Google Translate, all patents are available in both their original languages and in English, and you can search across the world’s patents using terms in any of those languages,” he adds.

    Google Patents

    Last year, Google announced the addition of European patents. Prior to that, Google Patents only featured documents from the U.S.

    At the time, Google also launched a feature called the Prior Art Finder aimed at finding relevant art results.

  • Google Launches Big Improvements To Patent Search

    Google announced today that it has added European patents to go along with its U.S. patents in its patent search tool.

    In addition to adding millions of patents, Google has added a feature called the Prior Art Finder.

    “Typically, patents are granted only if an invention is new and not obvious,” explains engineering manager Jon Orwant. “To explain why an invention is new, inventors will usually cite prior art such as earlier patent applications or journal articles. Determining the novelty of a patent can be difficult, requiring a laborious search through many sources, and so we’ve built a Prior Art Finder to make this process easier. With a single click, it searches multiple sources for related content that existed at the time the patent was filed.”

    Prior Art Finder

    The Prior Art Finder, Google says, identifies key phrases, combines them into a search query, and displays relevant results from Google Patents, as well as Google Scholar, Google Books, and the web. A button for the feature will appear on individual patent pages.

    “Our hope is that this tool will give patent searchers another way to discover information relevant to a patent application, supplementing the search techniques they use today,” says Orwant. “We’ll be refining and extending the Prior Art Finder as we develop a better understanding of how to analyze patent claims and how to integrate the results into the workflow of patent searchers.”

    Google, meanwhile, has also been adding to its data from the U.S. Patent Office, and without getting specific, the company promises that more related stuff is on the way.

  • Google Patents Glass-Type Glasses and Helmets

    Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea found three Google patents in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database that could feature heavily in designs for the new Google Glass project. The patents were acquired from Indy race car driver Dominic Dobson and his company, Motion Research Technologies, Inc, on March 30th. That date was only days before the announcement of Google Glass.

    One of the patents, a “cell phone display that clips onto eyeglasses” might come as a comfort to those worried that Google Glass headbands might not work with their prescription eyewear. The patent covers a housing with “one or more first clips configured to removably secure the first housing to a frame of eyeglasses” and a second housing “configured to display the image to the user through the lens opening.”

    The other two patents cover “Multi-use eyeglasses with human I/O interface embedded” and an “Ambient light display and system for displaying data.” The Multi-use eyeglasses, as described, would be very similar to the designs of Google Glass that were shown off. The ambient light display is part of the technology that makes devices such as Google Glass possible, but the patent files also include illustrations of a heads-up display inside of a motorcycle helmet. It’s not a stretch to see military and sports applications for Google Glass devices. As long as they are not actually made of glass, of course.

    Google’s new initiative for wearable smart computing has been the subject of mockery, ridicule, and cynicism. However, there are rumors that both sunglass designer Oakley and video game publisher Valve are getting into the wearable computing market. With all of these leaders in their respective industries pushing the concept, consumers will be seeing these devices sooner rather than later.

    (via Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea)