Red Bend, a VC-backed mobile phone software developer, is taking Google to court over alleged infringement of a patent it holds.

In its legal complaint filed earlier this week in Boston’s district court, Red Bend claims the Internet giant is using a patented algorithm that allows it to issue smaller-sized updates for its Chrome Web browser.

The software maker says it has invented technology that enables wireless carriers to distribute updates for mobile-phone software and that Google’s updating process for Chrome uses a similar differential compression algorithm called Courgette (that’d be the French word for zucchini).

Basically, Courgette enables software developers to update portions of existing products rather than replace them in their entirety. According to Google’s developer documentation, Courgette is a more efficient way to identify where and how changes must be made in the underlying code.

According to Red Bend, this technology infringes on a patent it filed more than 10 years ago and which it was awarded in April 2003 (USPTO: 6,546,552). The patent is titled “Difference extraction between two versions of data-tables containing intra-references” and covers a method for generating a compact difference result between an old and a new program.

Red Bend claims Google has known about its patent concerns since early September. Google has not commented on the allegations because it says it has not yet been served with the complaint.

The mobile phone software company, which has offices around the world but was originally founded in Israel, is backed by roughly $34 million in venture capital from investors like Carmel Ventures, Greylock Partners, Pitango Venture Capital and Infinity.

(Via Law360)