Yandex received a patent claim from Fellowship Filtering Technologies

According to Vedomosti, quite recently the American company Fellowship Filtering Technologies filed a lawsuit, accusing Yandex of using a previously registered patent technology for analyzing user behavior.



This patent was registered in 1999 under the number 5884282 in the United States. The inventor of the technology is a mathematician and co-founder of Fellowship Filtering Technologies, Gary Robinson. The system of automatic data filtering developed by him is capable of collecting and storing information about user behavior, and offering them relevant content based on the preferences of people with similar preferences. The lawsuit alleges that, based on the algorithms created by Gary Robinson, Yandex developed its own system for analyzing user behavior.



This lawsuit was filed with three legal entities: Yandex NV (the Dutch company that owns Russian Yandex), Yandex LLC (directly Yandex) and Yandex Inc. (company in the USA). Fellowship Filtering Technologies requires recognition of patent infringement and reimbursement of monetary damage (the amount is not specified in the document), as well as receipt of royalties from Yandex.

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More than a dozen companies have received such claims from Fellowship Filtering Technologies, including such major players as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Adobe Systems, Baidu, Salesforce.com, Cloudera, NetSuite, Oracle America, Callidus Software, SAP America, TIBCO Software, eHarmony , IAC / InterActiveCorp, Open Text. However, most of the lawsuits ended in settlement agreements in a fairly short time. According to Yevgeny Oreshin, a senior lawyer at Goltsblat BLP, this indicates that the parties reached a compromise, and the plaintiff still received monetary compensation.



Vladislav Kochetkov, Chairman of the Board of Finam, believes that the American company probably patented a very general algorithm in 1999, and, due to the fact that technology has developed significantly over the past years, its founders are unlikely to receive the requested amounts, which can vary from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. In his opinion, the major market players most likely decided to pay off the unnecessary headache associated with patent disputes, paying relatively small amounts - from several hundred thousand to several million. These figures are incomparably small compared to the profits that companies receive using filtering technology of user preferences. Yandex alone earned 38.4 billion rubles in contextual advertising over the past nine months, which is 98% of the company's total revenue.



A representative of Yandex Asya Melkumova argues that at this time the company is studying the lawsuit of Fellowship Filtering Technologies and "does not expect significant problems for itself in connection with it." In this case, the amount requested by the claimant is not disclosed.