Did Google Earth steal code from Terra Vision? Netflix plot reality check

The new Netflix series “The Billion Dollar Code” is around a real-life patent dispute: Did Google Earth steel Terra Vision’s code? How much truth is there in the Netflix narrative about the creation of Google Maps? The Netflix plot in a reality check:

Did Google Earth (on which Google Maps is based) steal the code from Terra Vision? That is the topic of a Netflix series currently being shown in Germany on the streaming service under the title “The Billion Dollar Code”. Netflix is thus taking on a rather difficult genre, namely into the topic of patent protection and patent infringement of programming code.

Netflix plot: Google against visionary German inventors

In the Netflix plot, this is focused – remarkably in the “too-many-leaves scene” – on the essential invention step when the two “inventors” of Terra Vision found a programming solution in Berlin (Germany) in the early 1990s, which described a method of pictorial representation for display to a user with a “selectable viewpoint” that takes into account the user’s location and viewing direction – and thus scale. Ultimately, this is necessary to be able to split a digital image visualisation into smaller sections and link them to requesting higher resolution data, which in turn is stored centrally. This enabled, for the first time, the fluid image visualisation that has become a matter of course for all of us.

This happened in reality and can probably rightly be regarded as the decisive invention step for digital visualisation in a big data environment; the two “inventors” of Terra Vision were awarded US Patent No. RE44550 in 2013 for this, entitled “Method and Device for Pictorial Representation of Space-Related Data”, with priority date December 1995 from German Patent DE1995149306.

However, Netflix has given the two inventors new names /alias: the Netflix programmer “Juri” in reality is Pavel Mayer, and the visionary art student/art professor and founder of Art+Com “Carsten Schlüter” in reality is Joachim Sauter – who unfortunately recently died.

The company names, on the other hand, have not been changed: Art+Com is called that in Netflix and in reality, and the US company Silicon Graphics, Inc. also plays a significant role in the events, both fictitiously and in reality.

Silicon Graphics – Key role in the real Google Earth dispute

The first implementation of Terravision used the Onyx computers developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. – they were simply the most powerful at the time. At the time, Silicon Graphics employed two people who later held senior positions at Google: Michael Jones, who served as Chief Technology Officer of Google Earth between 2008 and 2015, and Brian McClendon, who was Vice President of Engineering at Google between 2004 and 2015.

From 2006 onwards, Art+Com and Google had a proven email conversation about the Terravision technology, and Michael Jones also visited Art+Com in Germany to talk about licensing or acquiring patents. Because at that time Google was conducting a patent infringement lawsuit against a third party company and was keen to refer to Terra Vision’s technology, which was already patented in Germany and therefore public, Google described Art+Com’s patent as a “nice-to-have patent”. Nevertheless, the patent was not sold, and Art+Com finally stopped communicating with Google in December 2007, but then contacted Google again from 2010 onwards, explaining “that Google Earth may need a licence under the patent” – but in vain.

Google Earth a plagiarism? Fight in US courts

Instead, this eventually led to an ongoing patent dispute, and this is where the Netflix plot is fictional narrative. In reality, instead, Google tried to have the US patent declared invalid through two petitions for inter partes review (IPR); however, both petitions were rejected. Art+Com in turn filed an infringement suit against Google in the USA in 2014 – with high claims for damages.

The main controversy before the US court was not the great similarity between Terra Vision, developed by Art+Com, and the later Google Earth, but the question of whether Art+Com’s patent was valid at all. Google argued that the decisive mechanism of the display in Terra Vision had already been shown publicly by a third party even before the German patent was granted in 1995: there was evidence of a publication from 1994 given by an employee at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) about a geographic visualisation system called “SRI TerraVision”. This employee also acted as a “key witness” for Google – which, however, is not presented in the Netflix plot.

In vain, Art+Com claimed that this “SRI TerraVision” did not provide the solution to the problem, that had been decisive for the success of Terra Vision. In particular, SRI version did not contain any steps that involve the division of a parent node into child nodes – but this is contained in the main claim of Art+Com’s patent.

But the jury of the US court rejected this. For the SRI TerraVision system had been public demonstrated at two technical conferences without any effort at secrecy – inklusive a “coarse-to-fine” zoom action, as is also shown in the Art+Com’s TerraVision. The jury therefore considered the “Art+Com Terra Vision” to be basically a comparable computer technology as the patent-free and earlier “SRI TerraVision”.

For this reason, Art+Com’s claim was rejected and the US patent on Art+Com’s Terra Vision was declared invalid. This is because a patent must always meet the requirements of novelty and inventive step, so the invention must not have been made public before the patent application was filed.

The jury’s verdict was also upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ultimately in 2017 (District Court for the District of Delaware in No. 1:14-cv-00217-TBD, ART+COM INNOVATIONPOOL GMBH v. GOOGLE LLC). The US patent on Terra Vision by Art+Com has been declared invalid, and the underlying German patent has of course long since expired due to the passage of 20 years.

It is remarkable that Netflix is now helping to bring this event to renewed public attention. Our conclusion: proving whether a code has been stolen is always a problem for courts all over the world, it’s really difficult. For it is in the nature of coding that it is not public – yet certain key effects are strikingly similar, indeed identical. At the same time, however, both parties to the dispute usually do not want to submit the complete code to the courts, because that is where the real market advantage lies. And by the way, it is not so easy to find experts in the courts – and certainly not among jury members – with the necessary expertise and understanding of coding.

In any case, we can only agree with the basic message of this Netflix series: one should always protect one’s inventions as patents if possible. At least that’s what the Berlin inventors of Terra Vision have done – and far ahead of their time.

If you want any protection or defence of code, algorithm or artificial intelligence, please contact us.

Sources: 

invalid US Patent of Art+Com / Terra Vision

Judgement: U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit of 2017

Image:

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