Tech company claims Google stole IP for advert services

A California-based company has accused Google of stealing its IP for the development of advertisement services.

In a complaint filed yesterday, July 15 at the US District Court for the Southern District of California, Impact Engine said it had disclosed proprietary information to Google under the impression of a potential partnership.

It said Google had then used this to develop its own advertising platform without licencing the technology from Impact Engine.

According to the complaint, Google services such as Google Ads, Google AdWords, Google Display Ad Builder and Google AdSense infringe six of its patents (US numbers 7,870,497; 8,356,253; 8,930,832; 9,361,632; 9,805,393; 10,068,253).

According to Impact Engine, in 2005 it developed an advertising technology for rapidly producing and customising online advertisements.

It said that prior to meeting Impact Engine, Google released AdSense, a network for connecting online display advertisers with website publishers looking to monetise unsold ad space on their websites.

But, “the advertising industry was unimpressed with AdSense and the poor performance of the ads it allowed,” the complaint alleged.

Impact Engine said that due to the success of its own technology and the poor response to Google’s AdSense, it connected with Google on a number of occasions to discuss the possibility of a partnership.

It said that over the course of these meetings, it sent “multiple confidential memoranda” to Google.

Additionally, it said as a condition to continuing discussions, Google asked Impact Engine to develop a Google-specific advertising platform prototype and share the source code. This was required in six weeks.

“It was a monumental task,” Impact Engine said, adding that it had to put its own products on halt and reprioritise its team to develop “a dynamic advertisement building platform specifically catered to Google”.

“To do so, Impact Engine’s development team collectively laboured for over two thousand hours. Google paid nothing for this work,” the company said.

Impact Engine said this platform was then presented to Google in a meeting shortly after. Impact said that in this meeting, “the deeper” its head developer went into describing Impact’s proprietary technology, the more Google’s representatives seemed to become uncomfortable.

“In the middle of this presentation, the Google representative abruptly left the room. The meeting was over,” the complaint said.

Eighteen months after this April 2007 meeting, Google released the first iteration of its competing product, dubbed “Display Ad Builder.”

“Despite the fact that Display Ad Builder was based upon the work product Impact Engine had provided confidentially and with various intellectual property protections, Google released this product as its own,” Impact said.

Impact Engine is seeking a declaration that Google has infringed its patents, royalty fees and an injunction.