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Was Google Earth Stolen?
- _xy8h 5y agoTLDR: Nope. > However, I don’t believe anything was actually stolen from, copied from, or even directly inspired by ART+COM.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- djmips 5y agoBetteridge's law of headlines
- dang 5y agoRecent related threads: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28900180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28900180 - Oct 2021 (61 comments) The predecessor to Google Earth was clumsy, yet powerful - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28626361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28626361 - Sept 2021 (52 comments)
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.md/jSUqI https://archive.md/jSUqI http://web.archive.org/web/20211019020004/https://avibarzeev.medium.com/was-google-earth-stolen-7d1b821e589b http://web.archive.org/web/20211019020004/https://avibarzeev...
- avibarzeev 5y agoHere's a free link if you need it https://avibarzeev.medium.com/was-google-earth-stolen-7d1b821e589b?sk=ed5a4625b077ce2dd6f1b7e3cdf4cae6 https://avibarzeev.medium.com/was-google-earth-stolen-7d1b82...
- AlbertCory 5y agoGreat article. I was actually responsible for invalidating another maps-related patent from the 1990s, in Germany. I was in Patent Litigation and I also remember having a "ART+COM" folder in my email, but that's about all I can remember. I don't think the case was very active by 2014. Anyhow, there's something Avi said that I have to comment on: The test for patent-worthiness is: “would it be non-obvious to someone who is skilled in the art?” I’d been doing “stupid programmer tricks” like this since high school, as have many others in my field. If only it were so simple! You would think that "hey, that's just a stupid programmer trick!" would be enough to render something obvious, but you'd be wrong. That's what my paper [1] is about. No, to call "obvious" the combination of references A and B, there usually has to be some "teaching, suggestion, or motivation" in the literature that it would be a good idea to combine A and B. There are nuances to this statement, in case anyone's feeling pedantic. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580
- avibarzeev 5y agoYeah, I was trying to keep it simple, but you convinced me to edit that line out for correctness. Thanks! Their patent was invalidated in 2017. Here's why: https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/10/25/cafc-affirms-invalidity-geographic-map-visualization-patent-asserted-against-google-earth/id=89554/ https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/10/25/cafc-affirms-invalidit...
- AlbertCory 5y agoMy paper was an attempt to cast our "native common sense as practitioners of the art" into a legal framework that already exists. If a technique is "obvious to try" then you're not entitled to a patent for trying it. You can laugh at "native common sense" as being meaningless when the law is involved, but actually it's not. In the right circumstances, the fact that most practitioners of the software art see things a certain way would be "dispositive" (as the lawyers like to put it). We haven't seen anyone create those circumstances. I had a senior attorney review this paper for me, and he had a lot of interest in the concept. He called it a "toolkit" and found it intriguing that software engineers had a toolkit they applied to any problem. You know that we do. The forces arrayed against this concept are formidable. Even Computer Science departments in universities aren't unified against software patents. I actually talked to some profs at Illinois, and one of them said "you're assuming that I agree with you!" He didn't. He had a startup company and the VCs had told him he had to have patents.
- bbulkow 5y agoThis post is quite nice in naming the people who did all the improvements. During this time, I was at a company trying to fit browser tech into consumer electronics, so we had to build the technology to run on actual inexpensive and cheap systems. Which became a core unmentioned technology, now called AJAX. Several engineers went to keyhole right at the time of the Google purchase, and did very well. Also remember Earth did little for Google, it was all maps - which had no flying demo, it was just 2d (ish) and useful.
- tinus_hn 5y agoThe basis of AJAX was Outlook Web Access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_on_the_web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_on_the_web First with (of course) an Internet Explorer only plugin to asynchronously load XML, then standardized across browsers.
- iszomer 5y ago> Whenever a movie says “based on a true story,” it’s likely to be fictionalizing large chunks of the story without sufficient validation, for dramatic, political, or other purposes. A lot of the theories in this TV series turn out to be bullshit. Ironically, John Hanke went off to found Niantic as a startup within Google and launched it's first augmented reality game called Ingress on this fictionalized premise.
- keithnz 5y agoto me, first time I saw something like that was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraserver.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraserver.com Microsoft was involved with it and used it to show off their sql server capabilities for holding large amounts of data ( circa later 90s)
- sMarsIntruder 5y agoI read a lot of IMO
- rnd0 5y agoProbably.
- cycomanic 5y agoThis is a great read about the technology and ideas behind Google earth. I have one criticism: the story confounds stealing the idea (in itself a very fishy concept) and patent violation. It's a popular misconception that these two things are relatated and to the authors defense it probably is the same in the Netflix documentary. However I think it's important to be precise when talking about these things.
- kohlerm 5y agoThe US patent system is broken anyway, so who cares? It still seems likely that they stole stuff. Google used the same quadtree numbering as Art and Com, that being a coincidence is very unlikely
- q-big 5y ago> It still seems likely that they stole stuff. (Illegal) Copying is not theft > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
- munchler 5y agoIt's not unlikely at all. We're talking about numbering four tiles in a square, right? There are only two natural ways to do it for anyone who writes in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom language: 1 2 3 4 Or (less likely): 1 3 2 4 In binary, note that both of these patterns naturally assign one bit to left-right, and the other to up-down, which is a very desirable outcome. E.g.: 00 01 (0x row) 10 11 (1x row) (x0 (x1 col) col)
- oger 5y agoI remember visiting a stall at the ITU Telecom trade fair in 1995 where I saw such a system demoed. It also had a 3D mouse. It was truly amazing at the time. I think they used it to demo the latest and greatest 155 (?) Mbps ATM lines… I had an interesting chat with the guy demoing it about upcoming VRML. Hah - history!
- kohlerm 5y agoYes
- kune 5y agoA Jury in Delaware decided already that Google Earth doesn't violate the 1995 Art+Com patent. So the thing is settled. But the fact remains that Art+Com had a working system in 1994 and the Keyhole founders had learned about it working at Silicon Graphics. As it looks like there were multiple teams in the US working on something like or comparable to Terravision. Heck, I wrote a program in 1984 showing the world as a ball with the contours of the continents at the ZX Spectrum. I bet hundred's if not thousands of people did that as well, it is not that hard and requires only a little trigonometry. I have no further insights into the story, but folks here should at least respect that a small group of hackers and and artists build a working system a good decade before Google Earth was published. I have yet to see any demonstration or video that comes near to Art+Com's TerraVision in 1994. There are papers written at the same time, a DARPA project working for a single military installation and a lot of work done shortly after TerraVision had been publicly demonstrated, but so far I have yet to see a video from 1994 or before comparable to Art+Com's TerraVision.
- kohlerm 5y agoIt was settled by a jury of amateurs. The judge was replaced at last minute, by someone whose wife allegedly worked as a lobbyist for Google. Huh?
- mxfh 5y agoIf art+com would have been some project by some Delaware boy scouts, the result would have been less predictable than what an, arguably if-in-doubt-vote-patriotic, jury of peers will preduce. This setup will always be in favor of US national interest, not what the rest of the world would understand as objective justice.
- lolwowok 5y agoIt’s somewhat humbling that you think a randomly selected jury has enough insightful perspective to defend American interests during patent litigation. We are apparently a much more devious and Machiavellian people than even I realized, and I work in the valley among the lot. What an accomplishment, in your eyes, to develop a world-unique legal system where even the process of voir dire furthers our supremacist IP interests at the expense of objectivity in jurisprudence. We should be proud of such a creation, no? Until you show us a transcript of the hearing in which the stakes were explained in these terms to the jury (which doesn’t exist, as it’d be sanctionable for the lawyer arguing it for several reasons), this is just gratuitous and uninformed criticism of a country that ostensibly isn’t yours — which you hedged by saying “arguably” behind one of the key points, because you know it’s mostly bullshit. I guarantee you the randomly selected jury barely knew where Germany was, much less the important lines to draw to preserve our sovereignty in intellectual property abroad. Ask any patent litigator how difficult it is to bring the jury to the facts, looooong before getting to the Sun Tzu realpolitik you’re cooking up here. If you’re going to make the low key America-is-stupid argument (I heard you, don’t worry), you can’t immediately undermine your own argument alleging that said stupidity intentionally furthers a broader evil purpose. It’s just stupid. We have so many problems with our legal system that I’m honestly amazed you were able to invent one I hadn’t heard before. I also think you’re imagining China here, not the United States, given how trade dress and patent litigation goes for foreign entities there (like BMW; hey, they’re from Germany too!). Also extremely undermining to the point of hilarity that you included that country’s specific take on intellectual property litigation in the “rest of the world” distinguishing point regarding objectivity.
- cryptica 5y agoSadly, the way corporations work, even if Google did steal that concept, that lawsuit would still be dismissed. Corporations are untouchable. I imagine that suing a big corporation must feel like trying to "talk to one of their representatives" to resolve a grievance/mistake and being put on hold. Then when you finally reach someone they tell you that there is nothing they can do... And there is nobody in the universe who can do anything about the injustice done against you. As their litigation backlog grows, and as resentment grows, they are increasingly impervious to the law. Too big to fail, too big to sue.
- OneTimePetes 5y agoWorser, they can engage in battles of attrition, which a single person can not even start to engage in.
- Marioheld 5y agoMore background stories about Google Earth and ART+COM Terra Vision can be found on this Podcast (Episode: 127, Chapter: 6, Language: German): https://freakshow.fm/fs127-the-number-of-the-denis?t=1%3A32%3A17%2C1%3A50%3A39 https://freakshow.fm/fs127-the-number-of-the-denis?t=1%3A32%...
- hanikesn 5y agoThere's also https://cre.fm/cre222-terravision https://cre.fm/cre222-terravision in German, which goes into a lot of detail with the ex CTO of ART+COM.
- jll29 5y ago> there is a much simpler explanation to the story than CIA conspiracies and ... https://web.archive.org/web/20130605121646/http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-05-09/meet-the-cias-venture-capitalist https://web.archive.org/web/20130605121646/http://www.busine... (Source: Businessweek, June 5, 2013 - now part of Bloomberg)
- adminscoffee 5y agopatents hold the world back
- nikanj 5y agoYes but no. Patents also make it somewhat possible to challenge FAANG et al, if you come up with a novel idea.
- dTal 5y agoI don't agree. Patents constitute a serious moat for FAANG et al - sometimes because they can afford to license the silly patents, sometimes because they themselves hold the silly patents (like Amazon's patent on one-click buying).
- nix23 5y agoEspecially software patents are an absurdity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RPKtMTjXHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RPKtMTjXHg
- ceva 5y agoYou comment is from your perspective, but you will never know what has happen in background on some higher level. Steeling information is more of an art and google does it and other big companies quite good.
- kfprt 5y agoIn the piece he links to https://medium.com/me/stats/post/d4ed11fc629d https://medium.com/me/stats/post/d4ed11fc629d which seems to only be accessible to the user when logged in.
- avibarzeev 5y agoThanks. The link is fixed now.
- julius 5y agoRecently there was a medium-proxy-better-reading-experience service on the frontpage. Seems to work for this case https://scribe.rip/me/stats/post/d4ed11fc629d https://scribe.rip/me/stats/post/d4ed11fc629d
- fouc 5y agoit goes to https://onezero.medium.com/how-google-earth-really-works-d4ed11fc629d https://onezero.medium.com/how-google-earth-really-works-d4e...
- perlgeek 5y agoThe part that annoyed me the most about the series is this: it doesn't show anything in trial about whether the patent is actually valid. And then in the final verdict, the jury decides the patent is invalid. Of course, if it's invalid, nobody can infringe it either, which makes the rest of the decisions obvious. (I'm also a bit disappointed that it shows the two Germans as being close to the CCC, which was firmly against software patents, but doesn't even touch on the tension this must have caused).
- glenneroo 5y agoMaybe you missed the last episode but there was a lot of tension regarding CCC but it was mostly (or strictly?) between the two Germans. One of them was considered giving up the case rather than, when questioned, ask if he had any relations to CCC, who are known to have hacked into NSA, etc. Also they referenced exactly that detail, that the CCC was against patents and they were in the middle of a patent litigation case. Spoiler: They resolved the issue by getting a charter of CCC members, whereupon neither of them was listed and thus the defense (Google) was forbidden from even asking about it.
- jeffrallen 5y agoI liked the series, and it told a recognizable story from those years. (I was involved in a small quasi-non-commercial startup in 95 as well, and we saw some of the same conflicts...) I understand that reasonable people differ on their understanding of the truth. If it's for entertainment, then no big deal. If it's for "justice" then that's what the courts are for: to declare one truth more truthy than all the others. And in fact, ART+COM did lose in court, so...
- mxfh 5y agoThe half hour companion documentary Making The Billion Dollar Code to the fictionalized miniseries actually comes around mentioning Keyhole by name, well worth a watch by itself. https://www.netflix.com/title/81503864 https://www.netflix.com/title/81503864
- ilya_lopukhin 5y agoHow can I get full access to this article? It's sad that people discuss it so much and it's featured on HN but I'm seeing just the first paragraph I mean, is it okay to feature and discuss paywalled information here and everybody good with it? To me it feels like an ad for medium.com
- sova 5y agoI remember announcements of KeyHole joining Google. Surprised this didn't come up during the creation of sensationalist documentaries.
- ScarletEmerald 5y agoAll with no mention at all of Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash, which included a quite detailed equivalent of Google Earth (called 'Earth', iirc).
- MobiusHorizons 5y agoI was thinking the same thing.
- CompuHacker 5y ago"The opening screen of T’Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel." From reamde, by Neal Stephenson, 2011.
- nitrogen 5y agoExpanding on the subject of prior art for a navigable 3D globe: A family member used to work in the weather graphics department at a TV station in the late 90s or very early 2000s. During a tour I got to try something very similar to Google Earth that ran on IRIX (but without access to terrain imagery IIRC, just weather imagery) that they used for doing weather animations.
- CompuHacker 5y agoThe Weather Channel's local stations' WeatherStar visualizations ran on an SGI O2 in a plain metal rack enclosure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeatherStar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeatherStar
- nitrogen 5y agoSGI had some cool hardware. This station also had an O2 and an Onyx, sharing an 18GB SCSI external drive over NFS, if I am remembering their explanation right (these memories are older than I was when I formed them). The software rep happened to be on site that day, and mentioned Inventor files, I think. I was kinda sad when I heard they replaced everything with Windows NT.
- paxys 5y ago"If you were the inventors of Google Earth you'd have invented Google Earth"
- jnsaff2 5y agoI am avoiding those new "reveling" documentaries, especially on Netflix but also elsewhere. There are so many cases where they are painting a picture instead of telling me all the facts (which may be impossible) that I'm afraid to get a one-sided narrative. They are basically entertainment at the moment and should be considered fiction. Same goes for certain writers books. They are getting paid to write books and then pick something that sells and paint a narrative. And then people think this is true, wholly true or useful whereas it may not. So sad, so scary.
- kinjba11 5y agoYou say "new" as if there was a time when documentary makers didn't have a message There is always a message and the line between fiction and nonfiction isn't always clear. Who is making the media and why, who did the research, who funded the project, etc. What's sad and scary is that media literacy and critical thinking isn't a top priority for teaching in schools.
- halflings 5y agoNothing fundamentally new, but it's particularly painful in this documentary (or "docu-fiction") though. Couldn't watch more than 10 minutes due to how biased it was, but friends were raving about how great this story was...
- marcus_holmes 5y agoJournalism gets paid for people reading/viewing, not for telling the truth. Telling an interesting story is more important than getting the facts right (from a financial perspective). There is literally nothing (except defamation/libel laws, which is why all the characters are invented) that says any story presented as true by a publisher has to actually be true. There is no penalty for lying, or presenting a fictional story as true. Any expectation that anything a publisher produces is even vaguely related to actual events is based on a now-outdated set of principles in journalism that are no longer followed.
- JackFr 5y agoThe feeling when you realize how formulaic John Oliver’s indignant rants are. Just packaging outrage and selling it.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoI wonder if geoscape view from 1993 game XCom would constitute as a prior artm
- mxfh 5y agoNope, it's not about rendering a single texture/vector globes, those have been done way before. One of there earliest globes renderings* im aware off, all complete with weather data in late 60s: https://twitter.com/wallacetim/status/908531916315471872 https://twitter.com/wallacetim/status/908531916315471872 * for the sake of visual impression, 2D orthographic/stereographic projections are equivalent on-screen with proper 3d-renderings.
- sydthrowaway 5y agoDoes this mention what the actual game changing algorithm was?
- DonHopkins 5y agoI would love to see the video of Stephen Lau's 1994 lecture showing SRI TerraVision. CAFC affirms invalidity of geographic map visualization patent asserted against Google Earth: https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/10/25/cafc-affirms-invalidity-geographic-map-visualization-patent-asserted-against-google-earth/id=89554/ https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/10/25/cafc-affirms-invalidit... >In affirming the district court, the Federal Circuit found against Art+Com’s arguments that Google did not provide clear and convincing evidence that the invention of the asserted claims were put into public use. Google’s argument on this point revolved around a 1994 recording of a lecture given by Stephen Lau, then of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), on a geographical visualization system known as SRI TerraVision. Lau also gave testimony during the Delaware trial on the operation of the SRI TerraVision system. Google also brought an expert witness who gave his opinion that the SRI TerraVision system anticipates the asserted claims. ART+COM INNOVATIONPOOL GMBH, Plaintiff-Appellant v. GOOGLE LLC, Defendant-Appellee: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-federal-circuit/1878050.html https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-federal-circuit/1878050.html >Google introduced several forms of evidence in support of this effort. First, it called Stephen Lau as a witness, who testified that, while he was employed at the federally funded, not-for-profit company Stanford Re-search Institute (“SRI”), he helped develop SRI TerraVision, “an earth visualization application” that “used a co[arse-to-fine] algorithm to retrieve images [sic] data across the network from multiple servers.” Trial Tr. 1029 ll. 9–18. He further testified that SRI TerraVision was part of the “MAGIC project,” an “umbrella federally funded research project” that focused on terrain visualization. Id. at 1030 ll. 9–12, 1043 ll. 5–10. He also testified both that he wrote about 89 percent of the source code underlying SRI TerraVision and that the project was meant to be put into the public domain. Id. at 1030–32, 1151. Lau further testified that SRI TerraVision allowed a user to navigate around a two- or three-dimensional representation of a graphical area and to zoom in and out to different levels of detail, and described how SRI TerraVision drew its image data from a network of multiple servers spread across the country. Id. at 1034–35, 1051. >While Lau was on the stand, Google displayed a 1994 VHS tape in which the narrator walks the viewer through the operation of SRI TerraVision. J.A. 2565. In the tape, the narrator describes how a user can move from a low-resolution picture of a larger geographic area to a higher-resolution picture of a smaller geographic area using a “multi-resolution pyramid.” J.A. 2565, 3532–33. The narrator continues: I did find this video of ART+COM's Terravision: T-Vision aka TerraVision (1994): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjZ-wh5jykk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjZ-wh5jykk >This video is (C) Joachim Sauter, ART+COM and Deutsche Telekom. Found it on Joachim Sauter's website. Merely sharing it with the world, funnily on a Google platform :D
- dleslie 5y ago> In 2001 when EarthViewer was first launched, the real “Brians” were still running the parent company, Intrinsic Graphics, doing what Unity and Epic/Unreal now have billion dollar valuations to do. The main reason that stalled, IMO, was that most game developers preferred to write their own game engines in 2001. At the time, game developers were using idTech 2 and 3, Unreal Engine, Renderware, Vision and a slew of others. I think Alchemy simply lacked market presence.
- AlbertCory 5y agoIt's good to see "what is obvious?" is still one of those evergreen topics, like it's been for 150 years. Now I have an even better one for you, and I'll withhold my (undoubtedly correct) answer until later: Wheels on luggage. Why were they so late in coming along? Was it not obvious? We had aftermarket wheeled carriers for strapping your suitcase in, so people recognized the need. The arguments that "people hired porters or trolleys" and "railroad stations had cobblestone floors" do not hold up at all -- no, they didn't, and airports had hard floors. You can find articles on this topic. I think they're all wrong. Go.
- betwixthewires 5y agoIf you've read Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson there's a similar yet much more advanced technology in it owned by the CIA. The concept of a world map on a virtual globe with information embedded is not a very new one.