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Google, Yahoo countersue Xerox on search patents

Google Inc, its YouTube video service, and Yahoo Inc on Thursday filed counterclaims against Xerox Corp in a lawsuit accusing them of infringing the document management company’s patents on Internet searches.

In filings in Delaware federal court on Thursday, the defendants sought declarations that they did not infringe the two patents at issue, or variantly that the patents are invalid and thus cannot be enforced by Xerox.

Behind Google’s Recent Decision About China

Google’s bold stand against China owes much to the ideals of the internet giant’s co-founder

At the annual meeting of Google shareholders on 8 May 2008, a motion was proposed from the floor which called for an end to the company’s activities in China.

When, two years previously, the world’s largest internet firm had finally started doing business with the world’s most populous country, Google’s bosses agreed to impose search filters at the behest of Beijing. Thus search terms such as “Tiananmen Square” or “Dalai Lama” threw up results that were either innocuous or simply censored. Many of Google’s idealistic employees, let alone its users, had long been troubled by the compromise. One of the site’s founders, Larry Page, voted the motion down, as did the CEO, Eric Schmidt. But Page’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, abstained.