Google has a pending patent on my idea. What are my legal options?

The idea of "News Aggregation" and specially "Social News Aggregation" has been implemented exhaustively by various start-ups and big vendors. Whether it is by popularity, similarity to a user profile (that is either generated manually by selecting a set of preferences or automatically by applying topic detection techniques on existing news sources) ... etc. So, i think you should be accurate when you say "My Idea" and be sure that it is truly genuine. Aside of all that, i wish you all the luck and success :)

There's something called a declaratory judgement action in patent litigation. They "allow an alleged infringer to "clear the air" about a product or service that may be a business's focal point."[1] "The thing you'd typically associate with a legal action in terms of lawsuit is a complaint by which one party (the plaintiff) demands that the other party (the defendant) do or stop to do something... If someone files a declaratory judgment action and wins, there's none of those effects. It is, as the name indicates, merely declaratory: the court speaks out on an issue, in an effort to clarify who's right on a disputed question, and that's it. But that can still have a lot of value in itself. It can prevent a lawsuit, or even a whole series of lawsuits, by resolving an issue pre-emptively. It happens frequently that declaratory judgment is requested as a pre-emptive strike by those who consider themselves or their customers/partners likely targets of an infringement suit. And that's what has now happened to Lodsys: a company whose customers received Lodsys's assertion letters decided not to wait until Lodsys might sue those customers, but instead asked for declaratory judgment."[2] I am not an attorney this is not a substitute for legal advice. I would consult an attorney immediately to determine whether this is an advisable action to pursue. Good luck! [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaratory_judgment [2] http://www.fosspatents.com/2011/06/all-four-lodsys-patents-under.html?m=1

This idea is not a new one.  It's possible that this patent would be overturned on appeal.  However, the system in the US is rigged in favor of granting patents and legal fights are long and expensive.  Google mostly uses it's patents defensively, but not always.   Continuing is a risk.  It will be small at first, but if you get huge, the risk starts growing.

I wouldn't be of much help to you. However http://patents.stackexchange.com/ seems to be a great platform to put up such questions. The founder of http://stackexchange.com , Joel Spolsky wrote http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2013/07/22.html on his blog http://joelonsoftware.com, talking about patents and how he managed to cancel one of Microsoft's Image resizing patent. Hope this would be of some help.

It doesn't make sense for Google or anyone for that matter to apply for a patent for a social news aggregator. This has been done by a lot of startups already. But if they have, you can try canceling their patent by submitting proofs that the idea was "invented" before this. You might want to try http://patents.stackexchange.com/. But before you do any of this, make sure that your idea is really genuine and not something that's been done before. Of course, even if it is not unique and genuine, you can always get Google's patent request declined if you have the proof!