|
|
2005: Google's Annus Horribilis
New products and services land Google in
trouble
BY JM
29th December 2005
As you grow bigger, the chances of you stepping
on someone's toes too increase in direct
proportion. Google seems to have stumbled on this
simple fact in 2005, with the latest being a
lawsuit regarding Google Talk.
An American company Rates Technology Incorporated
(RTI) is the latest to drag Google to court over
charges of patent infringement. The company
alleges that Google Talk, Google's instant
messenger software launched recently uses
technology patented by Rates.
Google has promoted instant messenger Google Talk
with the tagline "They say talk is cheap; We think
it should be free." Obvously, talking with someone
else's technology may be neither cheap nor free
for Google. Rates Inc has sought damages and court
expenses in its lawsuit.
According to the lawsuit filed by Rates in New
York, Google talk infringes on two of its
technologies patented in 1991 and 1995, which
relate to internet telephony. It may be noted that
Google talk was internet telephony was one of the
major selling points of Google Talk. Both Rates
technologies are about minimising cost of
internet-based telephone calls.
Rates has also sought an injunction to prevent
Google from going ahead with Google Talk. Using
Google Talk, a user can have voice converstations
with another user who has Google Talk. The Google
Talk lawsuit may also impact the terms of Google's
recent stake buy in AOL, according to which
interoperablity between Google talk and AOL
Instant Messenger was to be a reality soon.
2005 also proved to be the year of lawsuits for
Google, ironically, an year in which the search
engine giant rolled out many products and expanded
its search index. In the recent past, Google has
been taken to court over its ambitious Google
Print project, which scans and indexes copyrighted
books and puts them up for public view. The case
is still pending. Also, Google has got into
controversies over Google Earth which gives a
bird's eye view of the Earth's geography. Many
nations and organisations have raised security
concerns over Google's bare-all policy, enunciated
more softly as "organising the world's
information" by Google.
This year, Google also got into litigation over
the use of the GMail brand name in Britain. The
Britisher who had reserved the GMail name much
before GMail was born successfully contested
Google and won. Google ate humble pie and changed
to "Google Mail" in UK.
Earlier, Google's news aggregator site
news.google.com also got into trouble, with AFP
suing Google for putting up content from Google on
news.google.com without permission. Later, Google
backtracked and agreed to drop AFP from its index.
But AFP is not satisifed with Google's response
and is still pursuing the case.
Besides all-too obvious lawsuits, Google has also
faced fire from webmasters for providing
antiquated search technology, which they claim
makes it vulnerable to "search results hijacking"
by malicious websites. Recently, UK's Guardian
newspaper set up a spoof website to prove how
easily Google's webpage indexing and ranking
mechanism can be manipulated by using "blackhat"
tricks. Due to its hegemony in the search market,
Google results are sought-after by websites to
drive traffic. The Guardian experimental website
managed to climb in Google search engine rankings
by "misleading" the search engine to believe that
it was a genuine website. Google has earlier been
implicated in "click fraud lawsuit", which stems
from AdWords, its main revenue generator.
Very recently, Microsoft sued Google for poaching
one of its employees, and the case ended up with
both companies reaching an
out-of-court-settlement. The details of the
settlement were kept under the wraps. Microsoft
had demanded a huge compensation from Google for
poaching its staffer.
Google claims to be the honest do-gooder in the
big wild Web, but it clearly has a lot to go
before it reaches that position!
BY JM |
