Russian Era Vodoleya Clarifies Their Position on Suing Google: In Fact, They Want More Than $3 Billion

We have recently reported on a Russian company Era Vodoleya that expressed its intentions to sue Google for a huge amount of $3 billion (which is 15% of Google’s revenues) because of Google allegedly infringing a patent with its contextual advertising technology - the one that turned Google into a multi-billion company.

In the post I thought that the entire situation looked more like the company was trying to attract some publicity to itself instead of actually having the resources required to sue the internet giant - patent or no patent.

After the post was published, the issue was widely discussed in various media outlets and I was contacted by Boris Moiseyev, the CEO of the Era Vodoleya, with some clarifications he wanted to provide me with so that the entire situation was more unequivocal to international media. I decided the clarifications are worth publishing here as the issue has certainly attracted enough attention to deserve a follow-up.

First of all, Mr. Moiseyev wanted everyone to understand the essence of the problem as he claims that initially he did not want to initiate the entire buzz around his company suing Google for patent infringement. Instead he simply submitted the technology to a local Russian contest of innovative ideas and won it. To be specific, the jury highly valued the fact that a Russian company invented the technology that is now used by the largest international internet company for its core money-making business. Yet Mr. Moiseyev claims he did not mention any lawsuit against Google - the opportunity was allegedly introduced by bloggers of one of the largest Russian internet news blog without him knowing of the thought expressed in a post. Mr. Moiseyev seems to be genuinely surprised by the amount but now that the buzz is here, he still seems to enjoy the media attention quite a lot.

Then the next big question everyone seems to be mostly interested in - if the case is actually planned to be taken to court or not. The management of the Russian company told that they have not made their final decision yet as this decision depends on negotiations with Google that are scheduled for early next year.

When it comes to the huge amount of the damages claimed - $3 billion, the company is not actually sure this will be the right amount once they actually sue Google (if they do). The thing is that $3 billion is the expert valuation of the patent acting in the Russian Federation while the final damages claimed could be significantly higher as it is this technology (allegedly copied by Google from the patent owned by the company) that was used by Google to build a business around the search engine. The final amount is still to be determined by international experts should Era Vodoleya have to take the case to court.

What’s more, Mr. Moiseyev even mentioned that he thought they deserved 50 per cent of the entire Google business - and I am not sure if that was joking or not. Overall, the tone of the clarifications did not sound particularly serious to me and I felt like the guys really want to get all the attention they can.

I also feel that I simply have to share some results of my personal research about the Era Vodoleya company and Mr. Moiseyev himself. The thing is that the Russian blogosphere and internet community seem to agree that Mr. Moiseev is an odious personality famous for his paradoxical views and his habit of protecting everything he can with patents (he owns quite a number of patents for a number of technologies used by multiple internet companies). So I would not really trust everything this guy says - whatever his motivations. And I certainly would not expect the lawsuit to actually arrive - be it for $3 billion or 50% of Google.