An Israeli software company with an office in Waltham yesterday charged the way Google sends out updates for its Chrome Web browser violates its patent.
Red Bend Software filed its suit in US District Court in Boston, saying that's an appropriate venue because Google has an office in Boston and does business in Massachusetts
At issue is software Google now uses to let Chrome users download just changes to the Chrome application, rather than the making them download an entire new copy. Google says it wrote its own algorithm to figure out how to apply these "diffs;" but Red Bend says the new software uses the same principle as described in a patent it got in 1999.
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Comments
Prior art?
By Ron Newman
Tue, 10/27/2009 - 1:14pm
How old is the Unix 'patch' program? I bet it's much older than 1999,
Binary patching certainly dates way further back....
By Michael Kerpan
Tue, 10/27/2009 - 1:39pm
...than 1999. The Patent and Trademark Office seems to have gone completely nuts.
but they clearly are not all
By anon
Tue, 10/27/2009 - 8:38pm
but they clearly are not all equal. Google found their algorithm resulted in binary diffs for Chrome 10 times smaller than those from bsdiff, which was the best tool they had tried. And bsdiff is only about 6 years old.