Google is having to jump through more legal hoops as it defends the existence of its AdSense program. Essentially, they've been fighting against patent trolls Hyperphrase Technologies, LLC since last June. Google won the case in Wisconsin district court, as the judge rejected the case and granted a summary judgement in favor of the search giant.
I've been reading over and over the mindnumbing court ruling to determine exactly what it is that Google is doing that is violating patent here, and the best I can tell, it is the technology that will index a page and determine when two words go together, so as to provide better pattern matching.
For instance, it will index a page and see the words "Federal" and "Court" and decide that in the context of the page that it is better that ads that intend to target "Federal Court" would be better than other ads that target "Federal" or "Court."
So, essentially, Hyperphrase is claiming patent on the logic required to do contextual analysis.
This isn't the first time Hyperphrase has trolled federal patent courts. In 2003, the company filed an intellectual property lawsuit against Microsoft, alleging infringement of three patents involving Office XP, asking for $2 billion in damages. Hyperphrase lost that particular suit.