Google being sued over Google Talk

Leading search provider Google is being sued by a small patent-holdings firm for the unlicensed use of technologies that it claims it holds patents of. Rates Technology, Inc. (RTI), based in New York, has holds two patents filed years ago, which pertain to technologies that can lower the cost of non-domestic telephone calls.

RTI is claiming that Google Talk, Google’s instant messaging-cum-voice client launched in mid-2005, uses the technologies that RTI owns, and is hence making Google liable for not paying licensing fees. However, RTI is considered by industry analysts as a patent troll, or a company that lives off patenting technologies without the intention of developing products or services. Hence, RTI most likely registered the two patents in question in the hopes of someone else developing an application utilizing those specifications, so it can later on charge licensing fees. To date, RTI is licensing out technologies to equipment manufacturers Lucent Technologies and Cisco Systems.

Reading further into the actual patent claims by RTI, the two technologies actually pertain to routing of telephone calls over the cheapest possible means. For some reason, RTI had found a way to interpret these in the context of VoIP. This is quite a difficult assumption, though. For one, VoIP is different from a circuit-switched connection, being packet based. Also, Google Talk does not have interconnectivity with the regular telephone system. I expect this issue to die down soon without further ado.