‘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
#2Tried to watch it, did not like it at all.
Poor dialogs, poor acting, lots of technical bla bla makes hardly any sense.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#3After reading the article it wasn’t clear to me. Is this Based on a real story or is it entirely fictitious.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#4After reading the article it wasn’t clear to me. Is this Based on a real story or is it entirely fictitious.
Wikipedia says based on true events.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#5After reading the article it wasn’t clear to me. Is this Based on a real story or is it entirely fictitious.
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.)
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#6Er... 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...
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#7After reading the article it wasn’t clear to me. Is this Based on a real story or is it entirely fictitious.
Yes. And it was discussed on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7301630
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#8I found the references to 90's tech fun (like Chaos Computer Club).
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#9Tried to watch it, did not like it at all. Poor dialogs, poor acting, lots of technical bla bla makes hardly any sense.
but it is nice to see berlin in the nineties again.
Re: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm
#10After reading the article it wasn’t clear to me. Is this Based on a real story or is it entirely fictitious.
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 very much related to 3D graphics and game development, which had already come pretty far by 2004.
So the trailer implying they actually had it first and Google couldn't have done it without them seems pretty peculiar to me.