So Google Earth bought a company called keyhole that was formed by the same people that had done the Mars demo (if you saw this in the '90s it was amazing and you could tell the demo alone had a future even if the company crashed) for SGI which then became the basis of that startup which then got acquired by Google. And all of that launched the political career of Brian McClendon, a former SGI manager. Another of its founders went on to be part of Roblox.
‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
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Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#12As a programmer, I must say I really enjoyed the movie.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Art+com v google did happen and is findable via a web search. What's not clear to me is whether this is anything more than a typical NPE/patent troll lawsuit. (Google won the lawsuit and the patent claims were invalidated because of prior art or other reasons.)
As I get it from reading around Wikipedia they actually had something very similar to Google Earth before Google Earth/Maps happened. So I don't think it's fair to bring this in connection with patent trolls. However, Google didn't seem to copy any of their tech but just implemented the same idea (a searchable/zoomable globe/map), which doesn't strike me as surprising as the idea isn't too farfetched and the tech is…
Looking at the federal court decision [1], it looks like the patent was predated by an implementation that was demonstrated at SIGGRAPH, and apparently the creator of that gave the source code to the plaintiffs?!
"Lau further testified that, at the SIGGRAPH '95 conference, he performed live demonstrations of SRI TerraVision to at least 500 people, and in fact “gave [ ] the source code to TerraVision” to Art+Com employees who were in attendance and “walk[ed] them through the source code.”"
1: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-federal-circuit/1878050.html
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#14Er... it's not entirely clear, but apparently the infringement claim was based on "the ability to zoom from the globe graphic all the way down to a particular neighborhood"?! So something a mildly talented programmer could come up with in (generously estimated) 1-2 days tops? And sure it looks cool, but claiming this animation is original enough to be patentable is stretching it a bit...
As generous as the half a bowl of rice Kim Jong-un gives to his loyal subjects.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#15Er... it's not entirely clear, but apparently the infringement claim was based on "the ability to zoom from the globe graphic all the way down to a particular neighborhood"?! So something a mildly talented programmer could come up with in (generously estimated) 1-2 days tops? And sure it looks cool, but claiming this animation is original enough to be patentable is stretching it a bit...
There's (analog) prior art for the zooming from 1957, 1968, and 1977.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Ten_(film)
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#16Er... it's not entirely clear, but apparently the infringement claim was based on "the ability to zoom from the globe graphic all the way down to a particular neighborhood"?! So something a mildly talented programmer could come up with in (generously estimated) 1-2 days tops? And sure it looks cool, but claiming this animation is original enough to be patentable is stretching it a bit...
I don't disagree that it's not patentable, but high-performance GIS / tilemap scaling manipulation is not nearly as simple to build as you are imagining.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#17Started watching the show, it is way too dramatized but still interesting.
The actual demo of Terravision is indeed mind blowing if you remember how powerful computers in 1994 were: http://www.joachimsauter.com/img/big693.mp4
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Art+com v google did happen and is findable via a web search. What's not clear to me is whether this is anything more than a typical NPE/patent troll lawsuit. (Google won the lawsuit and the patent claims were invalidated because of prior art or other reasons.)
As I get it from reading around Wikipedia they actually had something very similar to Google Earth before Google Earth/Maps happened. So I don't think it's fair to bring this in connection with patent trolls. However, Google didn't seem to copy any of their tech but just implemented the same idea (a searchable/zoomable globe/map), which doesn't strike me as surprising as the idea isn't too farfetched and the tech is…
AFAICT it was only a tech demo. They describe it as a "research project" commissioned by Deutsch Telecom on their website. I don't see any indication that this company were actively marketing or otherwise deriving economic value from it when they did the lawsuit, or even when Google Earth was first announced.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#19Er... it's not entirely clear, but apparently the infringement claim was based on "the ability to zoom from the globe graphic all the way down to a particular neighborhood"?! So something a mildly talented programmer could come up with in (generously estimated) 1-2 days tops? And sure it looks cool, but claiming this animation is original enough to be patentable is stretching it a bit...
Is this what you imagine?
```
import gis
gis.renderGlobe()
```
the actual tiling logic, data storage requirements, performant rendering in something like a shitty 1990s browser... I don't think you have an appreciation for the difficulty of bootstrapping this ex nihilo.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#20So Google Earth bought a company called keyhole that was formed by the same people that had done the Mars demo (if you saw this in the '90s it was amazing and you could tell the demo alone had a future even if the company crashed) for SGI which then became the basis of that startup which then got acquired by Google. And all of that launched the political career of Brian McClendon, a former SGI manager. Another of its…
Keyhole also had some money in them from In-Q-tel which was also a heavy Google investor at the time. They wanted the concept of a searchable globe for intelligence purposes.
Also the founder of Keyhole, John Hanke, came from the MUD world and now responsible for Niantic and the Pokemon game. A true visionary of blending the real and virtual worlds.