Google Forced to Pay $85M for Push Notification Use

An Eastern District of Texas jury recently ordered Google to pay $85M to Texas-based, inventor-owned tech licensing company SimpleAir for infringing its patent. The award follows a separate jury’s unanimous determination in January that Google infringed all five asserted claims of the patent, which details a system and method for data communication connecting online network computers in real-time. The alleged infringing services—Google’s Cloud Messaging and Cloud-to-Device Messaging—are used to process and send push notifications to smartphones and tablets running Google’s Android operating system. These services are free to users and allow apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail to send push notifications from a server without requiring the phone or tablet to reach out and waste precious battery life.

In the damages trial, SimpleAir sought as much as $146M for past infringement while Google argued it owed no more than $6M for both past and future infringement of the patent, which expires in 2017. After deliberating for less than an hour, the Marshall jury settled on a number slightly above the average of the two at $85M. The award, however, is solely for past infringement—ongoing and future infringement will be determined at future proceedings. Thus, Google is not quite out of the woods yet.

Sources: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-03-19/google-told-to-pay-simpleair-85-million-in-web-patent-trial-1 http://www.law360.com/articles/520169/jury-dings-google-85m-for-infringing-simpleair-patent

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