The Billion Dollar Code is a new mini-series from Netflix that tells the story of ART+COM’s lawsuit against Google, purportedly for infringing their patent in the software (Keyhole) that would later become Google Earth.
One of the key person behind Keyhole wrote the following detailed post, which clearly rebutted the claims:
ART+COM’s patent was invalidated in 2017 because another group, Sarnoff Research Center (SRI) in Palo Alto had shown a similar system in 1994, showing just how obvious these ideas were by 1995. In a stunning irony, the people asserting they “invented” Google Earth were bested by a pre-existing system with essentially the same name and function as theirs.