The Purdue Research Foundation (PRF), which is part of the American university of Purdue, has just filed a lawsuit against Google in federal court in Texas.

This research unit indeed ensures that part of the code of Android, Google's operating system, violates one of Purdue's patents.

Concretely, the PRF accuses a Google engineer of having used a PRF patent to compose part of the Android code.

An analysis tool patent

The patent in question relates to a tool that exists in Android Studio.

It is the main product for Android application development.

Clearly, Purdue University claims that an article containing this research ended up on an Android forum in 2012. According to the lawsuit, the Mountain View firm would have seen the article on the subject and would have included the corresponding code in its operating system.

Android Lint, the tool of the system in question, allows you to analyze the source files of an Android project to find possible bugs in terms of security, performance, ease of use, accessibility or internationalization .

The PRF received the patent for this error detection tool in 2019. The university thus attributes the invention of this technology to one of its professors, Y. Charlie Hu.

With this complaint, the university hopes to receive a retroactive payment of royalties for the use of its patent, as well as damages.

A difficult dialogue

According to the university, the team spent weeks trying to arrange a meeting with Google executives.

Without answer.

“The lawsuit against Google was filed after a year-long preliminary investigation that found Google's willful infringement of several PRF patents.

PRF tried for weeks to arrange a meeting with Google, but when Google refused reasonable terms for a meeting, Purdue had no choice but to take legal action,” reads the university's statement to Endgadget.

In fact, PRF claims to have sent a notice of infringement to Google in August 2021. Despite this notice, the tech giant would have continued to include the "controversial code" in Android Studio regardless.

Hence the filing of this complaint in early February.

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