‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm

Started 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

There were a lot of 3D globe products being created in the 90s.

I was one of the creators of Electronic Arts 3D Atlas which shipped in spring 1994. It sold two million copies on Mac and won many awards.

EA was the publisher but we developed it in London working at a BBC spinoff called MMC and getting the planetary data from UCL. This UCL unit eventually spawned Planetary Visions, a startup we worked with to supply data.

That wasn't even our first 3D zooming spinning satellite globe product. We did a huge touchscreen installation for the Kunst und Ausstellungshalle museum in Bonn, Germany. It was called "Erd Sicht" (Earth View), and in the early 90s had amazing satellite Earth graphics and animations.

I worked on Google Earth for a while, some years ago. It doesn't really make sense to talk about it in the way the article (and presumably movie) does. There are lots of "algorithms" in Google Earth which are critical to its operation.

Probably the biggest unsung algorithmic hero of GE is the image processing and serving pipeline. The actual client tech itself was largely worked out by the time Keyhole was bought (hence the high age of this lawsuit), and the biggest upgrades to the client came mostly in the form of optimizations and support for new features like 3D buildings. What wasn't visible was the enormous amount of work in the infrastructure required to actually process and serve the whole globe's worth of imagery. At the time, Keyhole's processing and serving pipeline just didn't scale to the amount of imagery actually available for purchase. That's no knock on their engineering skills: imagery is expensive and given their business model there simply wasn't a need to process all the imagery that existed. But once Google bought them, they were given a blank cheque and told to quite simply acquire it all. The infrastructure of the time (MapReduce, BigTable etc) were a perfect fit for this problem and allowed a rapid drain of the imagery backlog that had by then accumulated. Over time more and more of the calculations done to the raw sensor data (like ortho-rectification) were pulled in house for cost reasons and to allow further scaling - the satellite imagery providers could easily become CPU bottlenecked themselves.

This sort of article/movie seems ultimately to have some sort of ideological driver, given that its opening thesis is "for every winner, there are lots of losers; the people who blazed the trail for the others to ruthlessly make billions from their efforts". I mean, that's not true is it? This blasé statement implies the tech industry is negative-sum but it isn't even zero sum, it's positive sum: the whole reason it's successful is that it's a massive creator of wealth. The assumption that the big winners in the tech industry got there simply by aggressively stealing everything is so far from reality it surely makes the article closer to propaganda than anything else.

If you understand German and like 4 hour long podcasts, Tim Pritlove just released a CRE episode about Terravision where he speaks with Pavel Mayer: https://cre.fm/cre222-terravision

(I haven't seen The Billion Dollar Code or listened to the podcast yet, but apparently the character Juri is (loosely?) based on Pavel: https://twitter.com/pavel23/status/1447622978859061252 )

Here is SRI’s project from 1994 that showed similar capabilities (and the same name) and was one of the reasons the court decided against the claimants in their lawsuit against Google:

https://www.sri.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/778.pdf

Tried to watch it, did not like it at all.

Poor dialogs, poor acting, lots of technical bla bla makes hardly any sense.

After reading the article it wasn’t clear to me. Is this Based on a real story or is it entirely fictitious.

I largely skimmed through the series, but the way this portrays the german hacker scene while simultaneously appearing to advocate for software patents feels very strange.

The series portrays these guys as the heroes, but in reality they just seem to be patent trolls who fortunately lost.

A lot of really cool retro tech stuff to spot though, they certainly weren’t lazy with this even if the politics of it seem weird.

As a programmer, I must say I really enjoyed the movie.

How did they get were able to acquire and digitize so many maps in just 4 months according to the show. That part was stange. They say they hacked it from Nasa site, but i think its made up, could not find the source.

I found the references to 90's tech fun (like Chaos Computer Club).

At the show in Kyoto... Does anyone know what kind of screenshot they are using for their demonstration? They have three of them standing next to each othrr. They are pretty magnificent.

Entertaining and seriously demonstrates to us all how tiny we really are on this planet and without push, shove and money and judges in cahoots with others against you what chance does anyone have in court? That’s why I became an arbitrator and make judgements on natural justice as opposed to the law.

As I have finished watching the show, it's like it is hyped up at a certain point. It's quite interesting, but as a developer, some terms don't make sense.

Would this case have been won or lost if Terra Vision had patented in another G-7 country and the case had been heard under the law of that country?

i'd love to read this story, but with all the scrolljacking, pop-ins, video ads and other ridiculous distractions it's basically impossible to do so on my phone.

good job.

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.

Er... 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...