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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

- 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).

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> The idea of using balloons to transmit data is not reasonably patentable.

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.

"Airborne constellation of communications platforms and method"

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.

Satellites? GPS? I think you need to look up what airborne actually means.

Look up what "non-obvious" means, and let me know if you still think objects falling towards Earth at a different altitude constitute a patentable idea. Floating communications networks are not new.

> objects falling towards Earth at a different altitude constitute a patentable idea

You may also want to look up what falling means (hint: working satellites do it, working balloons do not).

Just because the gas in a ballon is lighter-than-air doesn't mean it is free from the effects of gravity.

There's nothing obvious about floating communication networks. It takes a pretty large amount of engineering to get right. There's a massive difference between satellite vs balloon based communication that I don't know why the comparison even needs to be made. To totally reduce the two to "falling towards Earth at a different altitude" (which isn't even accurate for balloons) totally ignores just about everything that makes them different. It's like saying the idea of a car can't be patented because it's just a hunk of metal on wheels and we already have bikes that fit that description.

"And now the gods of destiny smiled on Henry Ford. With the three-judge federal appeals court, he finally won vindication. The case opened on November 22, 1910, and the judges handed down their decision on January 9, 1911. They ruled that the Selden patent was valid, but only for cars made to its specifications. This was a total victory for Ford, because no working automobile had ever been built to Selden’s design. Thus the appeals court actually ruled that no royalties were required of anybody."

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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?

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.

> Feeling any sympathy yet? :)

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.

Someone wrote up on the wrong side of the judgemental bed today.

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.

I think the patent is too broad it could potentially prevent any company from putting any communication technology on balloons.

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.

> 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?

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?

From the complaint: "Space Data started offering commercial wireless services in 2004 from a constellation of altitude controlled balloons which drift in the stratosphere. Since that time, it has extended the technology to service the U.S. Armed Services with deployments on four continents. "

"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. "

> knowledge of the winds between 60,000 and 100,000 foot altitudes

Haha, well I just started taking this complaint a lot less seriously.

Why? That knowledge for instance is crucial to decisions of how much fuel to take on board of intercontinental aircraft.

The complaint is that google took some kind of confidential or trade secret knowledge about these winds. It can't be the directions and speeds, because those are constantly changing, and this was years ago. It's not methods of calculation, or they would have said so, like they said about the other points. So the only thing left under 'knowledge' is the mere fact that winds exist there. Of course winds exist there. They didn't discover that. Google's not even calculating most of the wind data, they apparently get that from NOAA.

Also from the complaint something that really stood out me:

"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.

if we cannot manage to guide our balloon, we must, at least, try to keep it in favorable aerial currents. In proportion as we ascend, the latter become much more uniform and flow more constantly in one direction. They are no longer disturbed by the mountains and valleys that traverse the surface of the globe, and these, you know, are the chief cause of the variations of the wind and the inequality of their force. Therefore, these zones having been once determined, the balloon will merely have to be placed in the currents best adapted to its destination."

Jules Verne, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863)

Thank you for this. People's thinking on idea ownership and exclusivity is maddening. Thousands - millions, even - of ideas got us here, and they want exclusivity on the 1,000,001st.

I had to laugh about

>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.

Space Data themselves made a public presentation[1] of their network of balloon with transceivers (called SkySite) years before Google started their project, so the proof that it was possible was already public information.

It's not clear to me exactly what has Google allegedly infringed upon.

[1] http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=6520007226

So buses transmit data. So do cars, planes, satellites, the space station. One day someone talks about doing it from a balloon and years later, when someone manages to do it they stole something and must be punished?

I'm under the impression that in suits like this you have to show some sort of a material loss to claim damages. That seems tough to do when Loon doesn't make any money though. Can anyone clarify? IANAL

Its not how much money Loon makes, but rather how much money the plaintiff doesn't?

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.

> 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.

The money Google invested in loon can be argued to be less than Google would have paid to buy in the tech. This puts a nice lower bound number on the lost opportunity.

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