Centraal Corp. said Tuesday that Netword LLC has sued for infringement of a patent on its Internet keyword system, which uses plain English instead of URLs to retrieve Web addresses.
Centraal CEO Keith Teare confirmed that the company had received notice of the lawsuit.
"We've been aware of their filing for some time and have done some preliminary investigation," Teare said. "What that preliminary investigation has done is produce a strong feeling on our part that we will prevail in court. We look forward to a prompt and favorable resolution of the case."
Shep Bostin, Netword's vice president of marketing, was equally confident. "Our counsel examined Centraal and their system very carefully, using material for the most part provided directly by Centraal," Bostin said Wednesday. "... And that information made it very clear to our counsel that they had taken our idea."
Bostin says it's no coincidence that Centraal's service debuted "quite some time after we made public the concept of Netword."
When the company was granted the patent last month, Bostin said it was "not [a] goal to use the patent as a license to sue, but to use it as a tool in securing partnerships."
But following an investigation, Netword attorneys "advised us that Centraal was infringing our patent." It was on that advice that Netword filed suit, Bostin said.
Netscape had no immediate comment on the lawsuit. If the patent is upheld in court, it may have implications for Netscape (NSCP) and the keyword function in its latest browser, which is still in beta testing. As part of the software's Smart Browser feature set, the browser makes a best guess at the site being sought based on the simple English query it receives. It is the highest-profile use of Internet keywords to date.
Bostin said that because of "certain ongoing talks," he was unable to say whether or not Netscape's keyword system would be affected by the suit.
"We have discussions going on with a number of organizations large and small that are important members of the Internet community. All those discussions are under nondisclosure at this time ... but there are certainly discussions going on with major players."
Centraal licensed its own keyword service to search engine AltaVista in May. Companies register their brand and company names, as well as trademarks, in Centraal's Real Name System's registry.
That's roughly the same idea behind Netword's browser. The Virginia-based company won its patent in June for a technology that allows users to type simple words into the address bars of their browsers, where they would ordinarily type a URL. Companies and site owners can register simple keywords. "Chevy," for example, could be used as an alias to replace the lengthier Web address "http://www.chevrolet.com." The system works using a browser plug-in.
The patent covers what the US Patent Office has termed a "universal electronic resource denotation, request, and delivery system." Users guess a short "mnemonic alias" to identify a site. It works without the user having to know a Web page's "physical or other location denotation" -- i.e., the URL. The patented system incorporates a client computer, local server, central registry server, value-added server, and root server.
Patent consultant Gregory Aharonian follows patent news and considers the Netword's suit to be on wobbly legs. "I'm not saying it's not a useful utility," Aharonian said. "But the fact is a lot of this stuff was done before."
The US Patent Office, he said, awards patents too often because it is dealing with limited information. Many new patents are in the software and Internet technology areas. But when they are challenged, it's only at that point that the companies -- and the patent office -- discover there was plenty of "prior art" -- or pre-dating inventions -- for their technologies.
A lot of technology patented during the Internet's "gestation period" of the 1980s, Aharonian said, will show up in infringement battles. "I think this is going to haunt a lot of people trying to patent their stuff on the Internet. They're going to be unaware of the research that went on."
But battles also amount to patent-based business strategy, he added. "A fair amount of this is just games -- legal games with a lot of money."
Bostin disagreed with Aharonian's assessment.
"Historically people who do have a patent are the ones who do well in court," he said. "Our patent application pre-dates our patent award by two-and-a-half-years. The US Patent Office spent a great deal of time considering all prior art and found [Netword's technology] thoroughly unique and patentable."
But Aharonian counters that the Patent Office is hobbled by limited resources and inadequate access to good information when researching software and Internet patents. The database of prior art, experts, and journals used in the process are insufficient to analyzing complex technological patent applications.
"Unless the examiner has an actual document showing someone did it before, he's got no choice but to award the patent."
