Was Google Earth Stolen? | Hacker News Reader

Was Google Earth Stolen?

avibarzeev.medium.com

400 pointsbeirut_bootleg134 comments

Great 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

To me context of software patents; is like patenting a how to use hummer, and not novel innovation of hummer design. More simpler analogy can be applied to wheels, imagine patent where wheels cannot be turned left on any vehicle, because of patent. In context of wheel, I have no issue if someone invents and patents better rubber type and production technology, but patenting how rubber generally can be used on the wheel is simply wrong, it has not benefit to society/humanity.

If someone were to patent an analogue circuit, would the software implementation of the same circuit on a DSP be patentable?

Hold my beer for a minute while I patent the idea of reproducing analogue circuits with a software implementation of the same circuit on a DSP.

I personally think patents should only apply to significant investments. Anything that could be mostly explained in an elevator trip should not be patentable.

Rounded corners should not be patentable. The latest ARM core design should be.

But what if what you invent is deeply simple, after you've worked out everything and spent years simplifying? What if it is 10 lines of code but it solves a big industry-wise prod or exploitation problem? The concept might be simple but might necessitate years of effort to find and validate?

After reading constant praise about simplicity here on HN it always sound like cognitive dissonance to then read when patents are mentioned that something 'simple' should not be protected.

Patents, trademark, and copyright pretty clearly serve to empower the aristocrats.

A good idea will win on its merits or fail.

Legal ownership of ideas just tether us to paying Disney and Google’s of the world in perpetuity as they buy everything up.

We basically live in a state sanctioned system of quota and expropriation of effort. It’s not violent like the USSR, so we look beyond it.

And we spend a lot of energy policing it all.

I can offer this link to a podcast about this exact subject. Unfortunately it's in German DE https://twitter.com/timpritlove/status/1450041042930122754?t...

But Tim is surely up to clarify any questions.

I think there are two different cases that often look similar in practice. The first is when the invention is obvious to everyone but no effort is spent on development because it would have no value until adjacent technologies reach a certain level of maturity. The second is when the adjacent technologies have been mature for some time but there is a critical problem that needs a key insight to bring it all together. To an outsider these cases often look identical, the difference is that the former case was obvious in foresight and the latter case has a tendency to look obvious only in hindsight, but only a reasonably objective subject matter expert can make this distinction.

The latter case is a litmus test of non-obviousness -- all the pieces were there for some time but no one had put them together. It is distinct from when everyone puts the pieces together the second the pieces are available.

Patent clerks can't tell the difference.

I will say that the state-of-the-art for geospatial computing in the 1990s was pretty damn primitive, many useful things had not been invented yet. It isn't great today but it has come a long way.

Based on my experience working as a consultant to patent litigators, it's worse than that. I dove pretty deep over a few beers with these guys on this subject. What they told me is that in the US patent system, you can pretty much forget about using obviousness as a defense. Yes it exists as a concept but if you intend to use it, you'll probably lose so they never try to use it.

Hence the focus on prior art.

Obviousness is not obvious. It requires an incredibly deep level of subject matter expertise to even make that determination.

And. Some solutions that seem very obvious in retrospect can be the result of years of shaking down kinks, letting expert intuition crystalize, until something almost 'dumb' fixes into an invention.

Obviousness is the wrong caliper here, I think.

I don't have any experience working as a consultant, but how do you define obviousness?

IF there's plenty of prior art, then it's easy to define why something is "obvious" - it had been done may times before.

The lawyers define it as: the constant "false". There is never any such thing as obvious as far as the rules of their game are concerned.

Yeah, 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-invalidit...

My 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.

"The test for patent-worthiness is ..."

Novelty is also a requirement, in addition to nonobviousness.

The OP suggests there are more important issues for programers to focus on:

"I'm openly critical of their ad-driven business model, especially since the damage is clearer. That's broached in the show, but only to point out how much money Google would theoretically owe these guys if they'd agreed or been forced to license at 10 cents per use (which was very unlikely IMO).

Invading people's privacy for profit is not something to yearn for. It's one of the reasons I sold all my Google stock. I respect Google's engineering work and the great "free" information they provide. There are a lot of smart and dedicated people working there. But the biz model is not ok, IMO."

Sad that Google appropriated this guy's work for a "business model" that he does not approve of.

Perhaps there are many more folks like him, who have done solid, valuable work in some area that has nothing to do with invading people's privacy or online ads, only to have the product of that work usurped and given away for "free" in the interests of furthering Google's prime directive: selling online ad services.

No-one has mentioned the Egg of Columbus yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus

A tale of something that is "very obvious" only after it has been done. I mean MP3 is about reducing information for frequencies hidden by other frequencies right (I think that is roughly correct!) and that is a really obvious way to reduce bandwidth....once someone worked it out.

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's the rub. Because patents get issued for things that are so obvious that you would never bother mentioning them in "the literature".

Take dragging a map with the mouse as an example. First, if you're doing online mapping, the first thing you think of is to just grab the map and drag it wit the mouse, so you implement that. (Even though some clown has a patent for the act of doing so).

But assuming you've gotten away with that somehow, now imagine the first day of implementing it, when you "drop" the map while your mouse is still moving. It'll stop in a jarring way and your first thought will be "That's ugly. What if it kept going with momentum and coasted to a stop." And that would get you sued out of existence.

Now, the patent system seems to suggest that the appropriate way to handle this would be to search the patent database for "dragging a map with a mouse", find the patent for "momentum", license that from whoever has it, read it and learn how to implement it, thus benefitting from some novel invention, saving yourself time and effort, and reimbursing the inventor for his effort.

But in actuality, you spend the time it takes to draw a breath thinking about the problem, then code it up in the next few minutes and carry on with your day. Because there are very few things in programming where describing the problem doesn't also describe how to solve it.

I've never seen an example of a software patent that covers an actual non-obvious "invention".

> First, if you're doing online mapping, the first thing you think of is to just grab the map and drag it wit the mouse

When online mapping was first around the javascript slippy map hadn't been invented. The page would show you a given map tile, and provide left/right/up/down/zoom buttons that would load a tile one step in the direction you chose. Sometimes with a complete pageload for every step.

For example: https://web.archive.org/web/20040805053745/http://getamap.or...

Yes seriously. Does nobody remember MapQuest? Even that was revolutionary compared to what came before, but had no ability to move the map dynamically, and this was the state of the art until Google Maps launched. I remember sitting in an office with two other students and my graduate advisor the first time we used Google Maps, and our mouths were literally agape. My advisor said “the people who can make this work are going to run the world,” which was sort of accurate. Same feeling the first time I used a good capacitive-touch display with snapback and inertial scrolling: ideas that may seem obvious when you’ve used them for a lifetime, but sure aren’t obvious beforehand.

"Does nobody remember MapQuest?"

Technical and business limitations drove the design of MapQuest. That client computers had little computing power, bandwidth (on both sides of the pipe) was limited and expensive, and processing power on the server for a very low value user (per interaction) had to be meted. No one who used MapQuest didn't wish they could just smoothly scroll the map, but we were fine given many of us were on a terrible connection, ran on systems with limited graphics power (where even smoothly blitting a high resolution raster graphic was taxing), etc.

Every improvement (more computing power, memory, storage, bandwidth, or even business model, etc) in the industry invariably leads to many people all independently seeing the same obvious next step, many groups building the same eventual thing, and then the losers (from a market perspective) claiming that their ideas were stolen. It is the story of this industry.

Well of course technical and business limitations drove the design: that's what made it impressive. Building a client-side scrolling map would have been relatively easy in the 90s. Google's advance was getting there efficiently on a 2005-era web browser.

I mentioned it because I was doing online mapping in 1999, when things were as you describe. In my spare time, I built the obvious thing that occurred to everybody, and came up with a draggable map with momentum. (In the browser, just like gmaps)

Google maps was still years away. And tile server tech wasn’t quite there to ship it yet. But it was the obvious thing to build, and not in any way a mystery as to how you’d do it.

It's not obvious. It's just smart. And decades of momentum based apis have caused you to think of something you'd probably never actually seen in a ui at the time as non-novel.

Inventions are often that way -- think of the mousetrap. People knew springs pinched the crap out of you when released. But nobody had made a device to kill mice, yet untilthat was invented.

I don't know what the cognitive bias for thinking that because you thought of an idea it must be obvious is, but it exists. I say that as a patent inventor.

The "what" is obvious, it's similar to the way you'd use a real map (and not only): by folding or rolling it and sliding the region or tile you want to see with your hands until it comes into your view. So the concept of sliding something into view is obvious. On a computer you have to use the input methods available, keyboard or mouse to achieve the same with relatively few obvious options.

The technical "how" of the implementation is not really obvious, you could implement the same result in many possible ways, some better than others.

I'm speaking of the inertial scrolling tween that causes the coast to stop pre-Google Maps era, and makes the interface feel like handling an actual physical object, not the sliding of things into a viewport. Viewports and tiling had been done long before that time period.

That physics combination with drag and drop interaction was not obvious in the time period we are discussing. The closest thing I can remember to that sort of thing were side scrolling games that accelerated with the character centered on the screen according to the game's physics, and possibly paddle-based game physics dating to the Atari era.

Slowly increasing scroll was present in some interfaces. But not tweened stop.

My main point is that clever people often dismiss what they find trivial to be obvious to others, and while that's often the case once many examples have been observed, it isn't prior to the exposure to many examples.

> That physics combination with drag and drop interaction was not obvious in the time

Copying natural laws in our work is something that was obvious for humans for millennia. We've been imagining space ships 100 years before going to space but simulating inertia for an object "sliding" on a screen was "not obvious at the time"?

Of course it was! How to do it (well) may not have been obvious but the idea of doing it was there for anyone using a computer. The parallel with the real world was always obvious because this is directly analogous to how physical objects behave and you'd do naturally in the physical world. The world around you provides the "observed example", not other computer implementations.

I personally thought since decades ago about this kind of inertia while scrolling through lists or dragging things. I thought of transparency, skeuomorphism, writing on touchscreens, etc. long before they were implemented because computers could handle them. And I can assure you I wasn't the only one.

"Same thing that you've been doing for ages in real life but now on a computer".

P.S. I'm thinking of a holographic/VR 3D interface right now that replicates interactions with physical objects either by manipulating it with my body parts, with electronic input devices, or with a BCI. I hope I live long enough to read an internet discussion where someone claims this was just not obvious back in the dark ages of the early 2020s...

An invention is the embodiment of an idea. It's not enough to think of a humanoid robot. You have to think of and implement the idea.

Your interface is just a fantasy. You haven't taken any steps towards making it a reality. There's no demonstrable prototype. There's no documented research into it's principles that you have uniquely contributed directly to.

That's the difference. You haven't undergone any inventive steps, because you haven't created anything. You have a vague idea that such a thing may be possible, but haven't undergone the rigor of understanding and implementing a basic example of what you have conceptualized.

This isn't to be confused with comercializing the idea, figuring out how to market and produce it to meet demand, package it, and deliver it. That's a wholly different process, parts of which itself may require further inventions.

For several comments you made the point that the idea of inertial scrolling (dragging something and letting it "slide") was not obvious:

> I'm speaking of the inertial scrolling [...] That physics combination with drag and drop interaction was not obvious

Now you pivoted to the point that the implementation is what makes it not obvious:

> You have to think of and implement the idea.

Despite the tone of disapproval you just landed in agreement with what I said in the very first comment:

> The "what" is obvious [...] The technical "how" of the implementation is not really obvious

Will it be a novel invention to implement the inertial scrolling of a map using an exceptionally overly-complicated and completely impractical method that nobody has used before? No. Will the idea of inertial scrolling be obvious despite my completely non-obvious implementation? Very much so.

It is obvious because that is how you move a big physical map. You pull it towards or away from yourself to view specific area, just like with a mouse. That's how it was done since first maps. It's just obvious to move a big piece of paper on the table that way.

It's not that - it's the inertial glide to a stop that makes it feel like a big piece of paper that was innovative at the time. See my other comment.

This is a good point because I remember using mapquest before google maps existed. I did want real time map movement but how that mechanism was to be implemented is the key point. The inertial grab and drag seems obvious today but before that, I envisioned it working like an RTS game such as warcraft2. You'd move the mouse cursor to the edge of the map box/screen and the map would then scroll.

While that may be true there were definitely various slippy maps in GIS and CAD applications.

There were also other interesting navigation schemes that relied on multi button mice or tablets.

I still like the model where you hold down a button and the navigation speed and direction is controlled by the distance and angle from that click point to the mouse cursor.

is that because "grab to move stuff" was something so innovative or because browsers/PCs/javascripts was just not good enough?

I think "grab to move" is as old as our opposable thumbs. There is nothing innovative about it

That doesn't change the fact that the concept was obvious. In fact that's how offline desktop mapping programs worked before online mapping of any time existed. (Remember those? Microsoft AutoRoute for example!)

Perhaps you could interpret the parent comment as "if you're doing online mapping [and mouse drag/drop is possible in the browser], the first thing you think of ..."

Grab to move viewports with middle clicks has been around in CAD / vector drawing software long before that. I'm not sure about geospatial software which had less market. I'm pretty sure there was grab to move in various level editors when game modding was huge. Those are all ostensibly "mapping" softwares that made the notion obvious.

I think a good example might be PageRank. There were loads of engineers and researchers at multiple companies working day and night on search engine technology at the time, and it wasn't obvious to any of them. Basically it seems to have occurred to two people in 1996, Sergey Brin and Robin Li (who went on to found Baidu).

Although PageRank isn't obvious, it was inevitable. Without taking away from its usefulness, it's the kind of thing that would have been invented very soon anyway. It was basically invented as soon as the internet had enough information to make such approach superior.

Such innovation does not need the protection of the patent system any more than the obvious inventions do, it happens on its own.

I do like the "inevitable" test. It ties in with my belief that there are many "inventions" that are universal amongst sentient beings.

Off topic, but I am very interested in the topic of what other inventions are universal (I've thought about this myself a bit). Do you have a list or writeup?

Mathematics

I've not maintained a list over the years. But some that I can name off the top of my head are: Wheel Battery Electric motor Glass LED Laser Book Lens Ballpoint pen Mirror

- you get the idea

My dad claims to have “invented” the brushless electric motor as a physics student, only to discover it had been invented many dozens of times already.

I think I agree, the PageRank parent and software patents in general are not genuinely in the public interest. I just think it’s one of the strongest examples that might pass any patentability test. That doesn’t mean the patent is a good thing.

This software patent was for a pretty non-obvious invention, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transf...

Perlin noise comes to mind. I’ve implemented noise “off the cuff” using general math knowledge, which appears visually quite similar. But Perlin’s algorithm doesn’t seem to me to bear any resemblance to the one I settled on. And at least for me, it’s non-obvious and takes quite a bit more study to understand.

"The test for patent-worthiness is: “would it be non-obvious to someone who is skilled in the art?” "

Well, nothing is harder to say than if something is "obvious". Locking backward, basically most things are "obvious".

"someone who is skilled in the art?"

This is another questions. What is "skilled"? Most patent courts assume an average person from the field of the invention and not an extraordinary specialist.

Interesting paper!

I've also noticed that many insights also seem "obvious" in hindsight (the proverbial "egg of Columbus" thing). In fact, the better the insight, the more "obvious" it seems!! Thus, "hindsight obviousness" is not an argument against an innovation

A 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.

It 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?

If 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.

It’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.

The point is the the US has a neat way of avoiding individual responsibility with that setup. Judges are way more impartial since they have personal accountability, that's how the rest of the world does it, where a trial by jury is simply, and provenly the wrong tool for complex special domain cases.

[1] p1514:

According to these results, the patentee is significantly more likely to win a jury trial if: (1) the infringer is foreign; (2) the infringer is a corporation; and (3) the patentee is the plaintiff. The multivariate regression model further supports the conclusion that American juries favor domestic over foreign parties in patent trials.

[1] p1510:

Patentee win rate by Party Alienage:

Patentee-Accused Infringer / Jury / Judge

Domestic-Domestic / 71% / 29% Foreign-Domestic / 38% / 31%

[1] https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_pa...

Not sure about the algos used, but the game "X-COM: UFO Defense" (known as "UFO: Enemy Unknown" in Europe) was released in 1994, and it prominently featured a 3D rendition of earth that was used in the game.

This 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.

> 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.

The basis of AJAX was Outlook Web Access:

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.

All 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).

I was thinking the same thing.

"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.

Expanding 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.

The Weather Channel's local stations' WeatherStar visualizations ran on an SGI O2 in a plain metal rack enclosure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeatherStar

SGI 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.

Your memory is correct. This was the default setup for WSI’s TV weather system. Early systems used Indy/Indigo^2 boxes instead of the O2.

In later revisions, they had terrain mapping but it required 8 gigabytes of ram for the texture mapper, at a cost of $60,000.

That was all ripped out and replaced with Dell hardware running Red Hat in 2005. The trusty O2 ran crawls and alerts, spooled WSI’s AWIPS data feed into iNews (how TV news produces the show) for another decade. It could still be there, running.

Interestingly, Snow Crash is mentioned in the first episode, where the two meet(the coder and the visionary), where they talk about which books they've read, and can't believe they have the same tastes.

I've previously written about Snow Crash and Earth. Kind of tired given all the Metaverse hype this year. FYI, there were other inspirations like the amazing "Powers of 10" movie too.

But I didn't think it was relevant to the patent case or the Netflix show, which hinged on whether two SGI execs copied anyone's code. They didn't. More relevant were actual systems like SRI's TerraView that were prior art in a legal sense.

art+com Terravison had support for arbitrary CAD models, SRI Terravision was a pure terrain plus imagery viewer[1] as far I can tell.

configurations of roads, rivers or frontiers, satellite images, actual temperatures, historical views, CAD-models, actual camera shots, are called up, stored or generated in a spatially distributed fashion. [2] were all not in SRI but in Keyhole EarthViewer/ Google Earth and not covered by prior art.

That should be distinct enough in usual patent cases where any minute modification of a car engine is patentable.

Is that mentioned lecture video of Stephen Lau, which I'm sad to learn, was one of the early COVID-19 victim[3], somewhere publicly available?

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

[2] https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=RE44...

[3] https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/pelham-al/stephen...

---

Some Excursion: even 10 years later, the most relevant IP to current mesh based / photogrammetric modeled virtual globes in my opinion:

The Rapid 3D Mapping pipeline developed by the swedish miltary devision of Saab, spun off as C3, that got acquired by Apple in October 2011.

The completeness and vastness of surface features was quite the step up from the draped texture on 2.5D terrain plus some random models.

For those who don't remember. The Google Earth/Apple Maps of today is quite a different beast to anything before April 2011, first available in Nokia ovi Maps 3d

https://freegeographytools.com/2011/nokia-ovi-maps-in-3d

https://www.slashgear.com/apple-acquires-c3-technologies-for...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_3D_Mapping

You might enjoy the "How Google Earth Really Works" article I linked from the article. It goes into how the multi-resolution texturing works and why it's unique.

I see the lineage from SGI's Clip-Map to Keyhole's Universal Texture to Carmack's "Mega Texture" to today's Unreal's Nanite for geometry.

(not claiming anyone infringed anyone's IP, just the natural evolution of a clever idea)

I 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.

The feeling when you realize how formulaic John Oliver’s indignant rants are. Just packaging outrage and selling it.

most of his rants are well justified in my opinion

my issue with his narrative and he doesnt really offer any viable alternatives execept suggesting government regulation (which is usually responsible for whatever situation he's ranting about in the first place)

John Oliver is fine as long as you remember he is a comedian that also fits the role of the left-wing equivalent of a tele-evangelist.

I think his humour can sometimes trivialize the real issues he's talking about, but he's nothing like a televangelist

I also hate it when he starts making jokes about people's appearance. It drags everything he's saying into the gutter

You 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.

Nothing 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...

So... certainly a concern of the zeitgeist.

In the current era, I think we've lost confidence and taste for balanced narratives, neutral depictions and such. Journalism is storytelling. Every headline, choice of picture or example is a narrative selection made by an author. Objectivity is a delusion, best discarded.

That "postmodern" take might be true. It's hard to argue against, honestly. That said, untruths can and do play a role. There's a difference between a world where objectivity is a sham and one where objectivity is not even a sham.

Either way, It's hard to go back. Documentaries and books today are making an argument, not depicting one neutrally... They're not even pretending to. That may make the endeavour more honest, depending on your POV. Regardless, no one owes the whole truth anymore and no one expects it. It's up to you to synthesize yourself a makeshift whole.

Has it been getting worse? like actually? I've seen some journalism from the past and it doesn't seem any less sensationalist. In the past perhaps a bit more formal english was used in media.

Accounting for that so much misinformation, propaganda and opinions have been published in the media even back then, the outrage that "these days" things are worse feels a bit short-sighted.

Thomas Jefferson even wrote 200 years ago “ To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.”

IDk if journalism was better in the past. People in the best definitely thought it was bad too.

I'm talking about the way we even structure the question today. There's no expectation of neutrality, and trying to appear neutral will seem like hypocrisy. If you buy a book on an intellectual topic, you expect to get one half of an argument, not the whole.

that media becomes the history books.. and these days, wikipedia.

>In the current era, I think we've lost confidence and taste for balanced narratives, neutral depictions and such.

Probably because the notion that we've ever had "balanced narratives, neutral depictions and such" is a bald-faced lie, per, "Negro lynched for assaulting white woman," et al.

The media landscape has balkanized enough that attempting to declare A Single Truth from on high (however fact-based, or not, it actually was) is no longer possible. To those constantly thrown under the steamroller of Stability and Civility, this is a good thing. At this point, people have to choose between convenience or truthz because a convenient truth is unattainable.

Journalism 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.

Perhaps someone should make a documentary about it. :)

This 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.

The 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

> It still seems likely that they stole stuff.

(Illegal) Copying is not theft

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4

In practice they stole the opportunity to make money with what the ART and COM guys had done.

Which is called competition in the business world, and is generally allowed unless some specific law is broken.

It'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)

I think it's great to give credit to ART+COM for making the demo they did at the time they did it.

Building a PC app that does it much better is also worth recognition IMO, and the Netflix show denies that.

The IP issues were resolved, but I think it was important to point out why there was no infringement for people who might not understand the details as well.

Recent related threads:

‘The Billion Dollar Code’: Developers Who Sued Over Google Earth Algorithm - 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 - Sept 2021 (52 comments)

The 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).

Maybe 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.

I 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!

I 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...

> 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.

https://archive.md/jSUqI

http://web.archive.org/web/20211019020004/https://avibarzeev...

Here's a free link if you need it

https://avibarzeev.medium.com/was-google-earth-stolen-7d1b82...

More 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%...

There's also https://cre.fm/cre222-terravision in German, which goes into a lot of detail with the ex CTO of ART+COM.

The 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

It'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.

"If you were the inventors of Google Earth you'd have invented Google Earth"

Sadly, 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.

Worser, they can engage in battles of attrition, which a single person can not even start to engage in.

I remember announcements of KeyHole joining Google. Surprised this didn't come up during the creation of sensationalist documentaries.

How 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

to me, first time I saw something like that was 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)

patents hold the world back

Yes but no. Patents also make it somewhat possible to challenge FAANG et al, if you come up with a novel idea.

I 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).

Especially software patents are an absurdity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RPKtMTjXHg

If 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.

You 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.

I wonder if geoscape view from 1993 game XCom would constitute as a prior artm

Nope, 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

* for the sake of visual impression, 2D orthographic/stereographic projections are equivalent on-screen with proper 3d-renderings.

Does this mention what the actual game changing algorithm was?

TLDR: Nope.

> However, I don’t believe anything was actually stolen from, copied from, or even directly inspired by ART+COM.

Betteridge's law of headlines

I read a lot of IMO

Of course, because really no one except Pavel from Art and COM really knows.

How would he know what other companies have done? Only the other companies know if they ‘stole’ the technology or if they came up with it themselves.

> there is a much simpler explanation to the story than CIA conspiracies and ...

https://web.archive.org/web/20130605121646/http://www.busine...

(Source: Businessweek, June 5, 2013 - now part of Bloomberg)

I 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-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

>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

>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

Probably.

In the piece he links to https://medium.com/me/stats/post/d4ed11fc629d which seems to only be accessible to the user when logged in.

Recently 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

it goes to https://onezero.medium.com/how-google-earth-really-works-d4e...

Yes

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