From The Scotsman:
A DISPUTE over a very large number of zeroes is threatening to distract attention from a $2.7 billion stock sale by the internet search engine Google.
News of the deal has brought a threat of legal action from the family of Professor Edward Kasner, who invented the word "googol" in the 1930s to describe a very big number. He wrote about the concept in a 1940 book, describing a googol as the number one followed by a hundred zeroes.
Kasner's great-niece, Peri Fleisher, now insists that the US-based company has gained financially at the expense of the family. She said: "If we do have a legal right, we're certainly going to exercise that. And now is the time."
Seems kind of silly to me. I'm no legal mind, but I think that in order for the family to have a claim they'd have to show that they profited from the term "googol" and that those profits were hurt by Google's use of the term. I don't think that's likely to happen.
More than likely the family is just trying to cash in on Google's up-coming windfall when the company is opened up for public trading.