ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,437,021, issued on Oct. 7, was assigned to Google LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).

"Search and retrieval of keyed data maintained using a keyed database" was invented by Justin Lewis (South San Francisco, Calif.) and Richard Dominick Rapp (Downey, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "This document describes a digital component deduplication system for generating packetized data with encryption tokens for transmittal over one or more packetized networks. A packetized data search determines that an encryption token is included with the packetized data. The encryption token includes keyed data representing a first digital component. The packeti...