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frojack writes:

Courthouse News is reporting that a patent covering caching data in a computer network does not apply to any Google apps.

Google apps that let users store data online do not violate a rival software developer's patents, a federal judge ruled. SuperSpeed LLC, a Massachusetts-based company, sued Google in June 2012, claiming Google Drive and Google Docs - applications that facilitate cloud data storage - infringe on its patents.

At issue is U.S. Patent 5,918,244, caching I/O devices across a network, which enables data sharing among computers linked in a network.

The patent claims, among other things claims:

The cache keeps regularly accessed disk I/O data within RAM that forms part of a computer systems main memory. The cache operates across a network of computers systems, maintaining cache coherency for the disk I/O devices that are shared by the multiple computer systems within that network.

The patent itself was filed in 1994, and published in 1999, has in excess of 30 claims, some of which are so specific as to specify the type of network, (VAX) and a tier of three levels of caching.

Had SuperSpeed's claims prevailed, they might have had wide ranging applicability to just about everything we do with computers attached to any kind of network. U.S. District Judge Sim Lake sided with Google on Friday and determined that the Google Apps had not infringed on SuperSpeed's patent however, the judge declined to declare the patents invalid as Google had requested.