Open Web Magazine on Ulitzer

An Israeli company called Red Bend has sued Google's Chrome browser for patent infringement in the district court in Massachusetts.

It says Chrome's Courgette differential compression algorithm treads on its widgetry. Courgette, which launched in July, sends just partial application updates to the browser to save on bandwidth and reduce vulnerabilities.

Google is also accused of damaging Red Bend by publishing and distributing Chrome's open source source code.

It's asking treble damages for willfulness. Red Bend's patent No 6,546,552 dates to April 2003 and was filed for in 1998. It covers a method for generating a compact difference result between an old program and a new program and is titled "Difference extraction between two versions of data tables containing intra-references."

Red Bend's software is used mostly in mobile phones and apparently owns better than half of the market for delivering "firmware over the air."

The company, which has offices in Massachusetts, is backed by Carmel Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital, Infinity, Greylock, Poalim Ventures and Coral Capital.