Thread by @pavel23

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE The movie is a movie, so it had to follow movie logic and simplify and make things. Regarding @avibarzeev article, I also thought it was just a case of parallel discovery, until Michael came to Berlin and told me his story, and one of the things he told me is that he added ...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...hierarchical texture paging to Performer because Terravision had it, while we back then thought, what the heck, if we had known Performer was going to have texture paging, we could have saved ourselves a lot of work, but actually Michel said he did it because we'd done it ...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...and showed it to him. Also there has never been bad blood between me and Michael, and if you read the court transcripts or other sources, neither I have ever said anything bad about Michael nor did he about me. I talked to him after the trial, and he told me about ...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...his work at Niantic, and that he was unhappy how google handled the whole thing, and he did not like what Google did with Google Earth in the longer run, and how they broke promises they made when Google merged with keyhole. Yes, Google actually merged with Keyhole,...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...but this is just one weird detail of the whole story. One interesting thing the court case revealed is that Michael actually wanted to license a collaborate, but the legal department and his bossed stopped him and made him break all contact with us, which in the end ...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...turned what could have been a productive venture into a wasteful legal battle. Also, before you can get money for such a lawsuit, these financers do not rely on my opinion, but looked into the document and provable facts of the case, and unless they come to the ...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...conclusion that there is something to it, that there is a high probability of winning, it never gets that far and that expensive. We will never exactly know what and who influenced whom to what degree. I once met Bentley, one of the inventors of the quadtree,...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...and he told me, he would not have anticipated that the quadtree could be used in that way to create something like Terravision, so while it seemed all so obvious to me, it did not to the inventor of the quadtree, so I am a bit reluctant to say with hindsight...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...that it was obvious what we did, and there is sufficient source material, media reports and awards from the 1990's that shows what we did. The patent is also an interesting read, and it even contains a description of CDNs, content delivery networks, that appeared on ...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...the internet also over a decade later. Did Google "steal" Terravision? An U.S. jury and court decided no, so that question should be settled for once and for all, shouldn't it? Well, unfortunately this thing wasn't just some patent trolls trying cash out on a large...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...corporation, and while it was that, too, and to team up with someone greedy it is the only way to level the playing field when going up against a megacorp. However, the whole thing would not have been turned into a movie if there wasn't more to it, ...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE and there is much more than what made it into the movie. The position Michael's stated to me was that there are just two ways how to do it, his way and the way described in the patent, so Google having that patent would allow to have a limited monopoly on ...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE "Google Earth/Terravision"-Type applications. Another reason why he wanted us in was because of other patent litigation that was going on at that time, where he asked us to help to defend Google against other lawsuits. So basically Michael did not question the validity...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...of our patent, and I believe he read and understood perfectly well what was in it, and while he never admitted Google Earth infringed our patent, I think he was worried about it because it was the patent that comes closest to what Google Earth does and had ...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...a very early priority date for that kind of stuff. Also with patents it is usually not black and white, and we are dealing with natural language and need to apply it to actual things in the real world, and in this case the source code.

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE I never had access to the Google Earth source code, but experts of both sides had, and they disagreed in their findings, and I found the google's expert explanation lacking, to say it mildly, given that they had access to the dev-team.

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE However, the proof of burden was on us; Google just had to confuse the jury enough, while we had not just prove our case, but also explain a complex history and avoid formal pits along the way, among them the problem that some events were 20 years in the past,...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...and there is the Laches-Doctrine which also favors the defendent when it comes to prove or disprove things, so every time someone said "I don't know" or "I can't remember", this made the whole case to get thrown out for formal reasons because too much time has passed.

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE In the end, only the jury knows why it decided how it decided, and they are sworn to secrecy forever, which is also a bit disappointing. And there were some irregularities like the exchange of judge shortly before the trial with someone who at least appeared to be...

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE ...conflicted, and some testimony (not from Michael) probably did some damage, even while we proved that the witness did not attend an event he was testifying about, he claimed to have worked with the actual inventor, an American, who sent us the source code and we copied it.

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE While he did not have anything to back up his claims, I know we only became aware of their project when we presented at Siggraph after Kyoto, it was not very impressive what they were demonstrating. While we had the earth, they had a few square miles around Fort Irving.

@interromm @avibarzeev @artcom @me_CRE In the end every invention seems to have many who claim it, but I think we have the videos and press articles and the awards that show where what originated, and we also did stand on the shoulders of giants, and Michael was one of them, but I think we gave him something, too.