Google accused of stealing balloon network tech behind Project Loon
thestack.com
thestack.com
- they met with Google in 2007, didn't form a partnership
- in 2011, 4 years later, Google started Loon
- in 2016, 5 years later, Google gets sued
Makes me think that Space Data Corporation needs cash because they've been unable to make this take off in the 8 years in the interim.
The idea of using balloons to transmit data is not reasonably patentable. Maybe there are patentable implementation details (I'm skeptical), but is it really likely that Google poached them for Loon?
Or is it more likely that Google said "oh balloons transmitting data, cool", talked with a company looking into it, and it came to nothing. It's not like Loon has poached any of SDC's military contracts.
If SDC realistically was going to make this mass-market, it should have happened in less than 8 years; you can't just extract cash when someone successfully implements a generic idea where you failed (in a reasonable system).
They're also suing for trade secrets and breach of contract in reference to the alleged meeting and NDA. If their meeting and NDA did cover this tech, I feel like they have a reasonable complaint. This isn't some company "from" east Texas that is just shooting bolts from the blue.
It's not like they just held the patent and let it get dusty, like you said they've been delivering working products to some markets.
> If SDC realistically was going to make this mass-market, it should have happened in less than 8 years; you can't just extract cash when someone successfully implements a generic idea where you failed (in a reasonable system).
So anytime anyone has an idea of any kind (i.e. no matter how stringent your standards for patentability), someone else with more resources and hands in a lot of huge markets can just say "cool" and then take it? I definitely think the US patent system's standard are terrible to begin with, and that the lack of real administrative effort to filter out unsuitable patents (or not give them for existing technologies) makes it abysmal in practice. But I don't think an environment where meeting with another company (with an NDA, no less!) means they might do business with you or they might just take what you told them and run with it will promote innovation either.
Satellites? GPS? Look, just because you say "here's an idea..." doesn't give you infinite protections to realize (or submarine, with exclusivity) that idea.
When an idea is a mild improvement (or slight step to the left) of another, that doesn't make it patentable or protectable, either. Google didn't invent content indexing or the search engine, and yet no one (reasonable) would argue they need to defer the idea of a search engine.
Besides, recovering balloons and transmitting data between airborne objects existed so long before this company, their claims are ridiculous.
You may also want to look up what falling means (hint: working satellites do it, working balloons do not).
https://fee.org/articles/how-henry-ford-zapped-a-licensing-m...
To wit: the patent on the gas engine was held to be enforceable only to that exact specification, and it changed the world more than floating balloons. Case law here is pretty clear, and broad patents like this would not hold up in the time of the rise of the car.
You do realize the patent isn't just the title right? Did you really think that they didn't mention anything in a 73 claim patent that rules out satellites or GPS? Or did you not bother to even look at the thing before you decided, conclusively, it wasn't worth a damn?
And how is developing a business to sell these to the military submarining it? Not everyone has the resources and market reach of a Google or a Microsoft.
> When an idea is a mild improvement (or slight step to the left) of another, that doesn't make it patentable or protectable, either. Google didn't invent content indexing or the search engine, and yet no one (reasonable) would argue they need to defer the idea of a search engine.
If your standard of "mild improvement" includes replacing satellites with astronomical costs to launch and operate with weather balloons that are sometimes within the monetary reach of high school physics programs, then yes, I think that's a sufficient improvement to be worthy of some protection.
There are so many crappy patents out there, but from reading this one (from the standpoint of what I think is right, not necessarily what the law says on this issue) I don't think it's one. Like I said, I'd be more sympathetic to your viewpoint if you bothered to even skim it.
In any case, like I said (repeatedly) in the comment you are responding to, I think the more interesting factor here is the claims surrounding a meeting with an NDA. Especially since they allege that the meeting contained detailed information, like work on how to adapt to winds at various altitudes that they say took quite a bit of study.
I'll admit I didn't read the entire patent claim, although I did spend a couple minutes with it.
> And how is developing a business to sell these to the military submarining it?
I didn't say they submarined anything. That was a genera comment about how patents hold even when the "inventor" (and not many patents these days are actual inventions) decides to not develop their invention. It's a license to lock an idea away.
> If your standard of "mild improvement" includes replacing satellites with astronomical costs to launch and operate with weather balloons that are sometimes within the monetary reach of high school physics programs, then yes, I think that's a sufficient improvement to be worthy of some protection.
They used weather balloons (already invented) and put a mesh network on them (already invented). To your own comment, it's not like anyone could come in and develop it from under them - it is costly, and that keeps competition at bay. But I still do not see where you think this deserves some exclusivity.
> Like I said, I'd be more sympathetic to your viewpoint if you bothered to even skim it.
Feeling any sympathy yet? :)
> I think the more interesting factor here is the claims surrounding a meeting with an NDA
NDA's almost always say things like this (from an NDA we've signed):
"Limitation on Obligations. The obligations of the Recipient specified in Section 4 shall not apply, and the Recipient shall have no further obligations, with respect to any Proprietary Information to the extent that such Proprietary Information: (a) is generally known to the public at the time of disclosure or becomes generally known without the Recipient or its Representatives violating this Agreement; (b) is in the Recipient’s possession at the time of disclosure; (c) becomes known to the Recipient through disclosure by sources other than the Disclosing Party without such sources violating any confidentiality obligations to the Disclosing Party; or (d) is independently developed by the Recipient without reference to or reliance upon the Disclosing Party's Proprietary Information."
So basically, if Google was already thinking about balloon grid networks, and wanted to see if they could collaborate with this company, then ballon grid networks are not covered under the NDA. Nor is anything else Google was considering prior to this meeting, that happened to be analogous. Likely if there is discovery, it will focus on this.
No, because if you skimmed it and then decided to say it was confusable with the prior art of communications satellites, you've just shifted from being lazy to plain disingenuous.
> NDA's almost always say things like this (from an NDA we've signed):
And you've read their NDA? I don't know how much more I have to couch things with allege and supposedly. I have no idea if they're blowing smoke up Google's ass or if they have a real claim. But you sure as hell don't have any evidence to write them off as confidently as you have been.
I'm sorry I didn't print out the patent, stash it away, go get a law degree, come back, study it, get a second opinion, and then comment, but hey, neither did anyone here, and yet HN survives.
I read enough to know I disagreed with it. I have been in business long enough to know you don't sign an NDA that doesn't cover internal prior art. I know you think you have a grasp on my ability to comment intelligently on patents and NDAs, but you are mistaken.
And be careful who you call disingenuous. It's an insult of a pretty high order, and were I a lesser person, I might have taken it personally.
Plus how long should an NDA be preventing you from doing something you've been considering partnership with another company to do.
Any serious technology company would have iterated on their technology so much in 8 years that most of the information disclosed may not even be true any more.
It's also unclear weather any information gained by signing the NDA was actually used in the implementation of Project Loon.
If your idea is simple enough that they can easily replicate and improve it, then yeah. Of course.
What are you proposing? An alternative where society will not benefit from this idea because nobody who actually has the means to realize the idea can execute?
"Examples of Space Data confidential information and trade secrets include, but are not limited to, accumulation of weather data, launch methods, launch timing, balloon types, altitude regulation, business methods, business models, financial information, technology solutions, and unique knowledge and interpretation of weather data, wherein this knowledge and interpretation is not available in public, which for example includes knowledge of the winds between 60,000 and 100,000 foot altitudes. "
Haha, well I just started taking this complaint a lot less seriously.
"34. In a March 21, 2014 TED interview with journalist Charlie Rose regarding Project Loon, Google co-founder Larry Page claimed that Google had been thinking of the idea of launching balloons for “five years or more.” During the course of the interview, Mr. Rose asked “But are you at the mercy of the wind?” to which Mr. Page responded: “Yeah, but it turns out, that we did some weather simulations which probably hadn’t really been done before, and if you control the altitude of the balloons, which you can do by pumping air into them or other ways, you can actually control roughly where they go, and so we think we can build a worldwide mesh of these balloons over the whole planet.”
35. As set forth above, however, Space Data had reduced this theory and simulations to actual practice and had conducted over 15,000 flights and accrued over 100,000 flight hours of such constellations in order to understand the wind patterns by the time Larry Page and other individuals from Google had visited Space Data. This concept of “if you control the altitude you can actually control roughly where they go” was something Space Data demonstrated in February 2008 to Larry Page personally with over a dozen balloons in the sky which were actively flying at Space Data’s network control center."
The comment from Page seems a little disingenuous if the statement from Space Data is true, of course it's a complaint so everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt but if it's true that seems pretty damning.
Jules Verne, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863)
>This concept of “if you control the altitude you can actually control roughly where they go” was something Space Data demonstrated in February 2008 to Larry Page personally with over a dozen balloons in the sky which were actively flying at Space Data’s network control center."
for just this reason. The "concept" is, and has been for 300 years, the realization that allowed balloonists to steer their craft.
I suspect they have a point, though, even if it's not well made. If they've done enough experimentation to prove they can maintain the position of their balloons at all times (or nearly so) well enough to create a reliable network, that probably qualifies as a trade secret. Knowing that something is possible gets you halfway to copying it.
It's not clear to me exactly what has Google allegedly infringed upon.
They can say they'd have Google's business if Google hadn't signed NDAs, learned their trade secrets, then decided to do it in-house.
This seems like the issue to me, they can say they'd have Google's Loon business. But that's 0 actual business. I don't see how they can possibly claim they'd have Google's advertising business since it's obviously completely unrelated to what they do.
We don't know:
* the NDA terms
* what the "trade secrets" Google is alleged to have taken/used are
* whether the patents are going to stand under scrutiny
* why they couldn't come to an agreement in the first place.
If I were in Google's position, I would probably have either paid them even a minorly extortionate value to come to a licensing agreement (to mitigate precisely this circumstance), or arranged a "clean room" to implement their Loon tech without anyone involved in the trade secrets having input (beyond the necessary "approve/disapprove" from some level of management above the team, since they allege the co-founders were covered by the NDA and knew trade secrets).
It's not impossible that Google is acting in poor faith here, but I don't think we can draw any conclusions until more information comes out.
I mean, the basic concept and viability of an ubiquitous network of balloons providing Internet access had already been presented publicly by Space Data (see [1]), so you didn't have to violate an NDA to know that. The idea that you can control direction by changing altitude is also old as rocks (Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon is based on it).
And it's not clear to me that they actual alleged that Google copied the actual mechanism and/or used their trial tests data.
If this is the basis for the case then it obviously has no merit.
Claims 'Space Data Corporation', let's not portray their statements as facts until there is evidence to back it up with.
In reality it's even worse, since NPEs typically don't (indirectly) cause physical harm to people.
For example: A start-up with interesting new technology and a headquarter near capital city (Government nearby/useful for lobbing) -> buy it, or a small company in the country -> "borrow" it.
capitalism.
I honestly disagree. They (google) try to employ smart people (as any company should do), they pull from creative areas- have you honestly never thought you invented something only to find out that someone else came up with the idea earlier?
I swear that I invented the Jet Ski when I was like 8 years old- like motorcycle but boat... I drew up designed on graph paper etc- mine had a glass shield though, but also used thermodynamic for propulsion (initial versions used a prop).
Jet skis or whatever were around years before I came up with that. I was just a kid. Still though- a stolen idea or just something that other people as smart as you might also independently come up with is a grey area. And the flaw in patent law in the US. To insist on generalizing such as shape of controller or magnets vs. the purpose of real innovation to make an arms race for getting money back on it... I all it all BS In the modern age. Just MIT open source it if you have the guts to.
I am speaking to the general you. Sorry for my long winded jet-ski example. I totally invented that before it was a thing (at least to child self).