WebProNews

The performance marketing network company will pay Yahoo, which holds Overture as a subsidiary, $8 million to settle a patent infringement suit.

Miva has finally been able to resolve a long-standing patent suit with Yahoo. The patent infringement case started four year's ago, according to Clickz.com, spurred by a successful patent filing by Overture in 2001.

Overture, now owned by Yahoo, filed suit against FindWhat, now known as Miva. The suit alleged patent infringement of 6,269,361, "System and method for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine."

That patent forms the core of bid-for-placement technology Yahoo uses to sell advertising on its network of web sites. Google had to settle a similar suit with Overture/Yahoo in August 2004, just prior to Google's stock IPO. That settlement gave Google a "fully paid perpetual license" to the technology.

Miva will have to pay a license fee on an on-going basis to continue using the technology. That fee and its terms were not disclosed. Miva had announced in a statement a loss for the recently completed financial quarter of $125.2 million; that figure included settlement charges related to the Yahoo case.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.