Wow. Google to drop '60 day prior' click fraud limit as part of their settlement in the Lane’s Gifts v. Google clickfraud case.

This is quite a significant change, theoretically advertisers that have never done a proper clickfraud audit and submitted a claim could backdate one as far 2002 (when Google added the CPC model) if they have the data. Refunds will be issued as credits on future spend.

However before your accountant starts rubbing his hands together,  the total amount of credits, plus attorneys fees, will not exceed $90 million, and in what sounds like a clever twist Google is able to bill the attorneys fees as an expense, it is a bit vague from their post whether they mean each claim will have an associated expense that gets passed back to the advertiser or deducted from the total claim value, in which case depending on the attorneys fees the value of which is to be set by the judge in the Lane’s Gifts v. Google case this might mean that any smaller claims could work out less than the processing fee and thus not worth applying for.

Could Google clarify this please as I need to work out how many 64bit Opterons I'll be needing to crunch through all that log data?