Man - when you are claiming 10 year old tech was stolen... I'm sure this will get the clickbait headlines and comments around google "stealing" someone's idea.

Man - when you are claiming 10 year old tech was stolen... I'm sure this will get the clickbait headlines and comments around google "stealing" someone's idea. To at least a bit ahead of things They did "terravision" which never went that far in 1994? They sued claiming their tech was stolen in 2014 (20 years later). Patent was re-issued twice, so they filed in 1996, then did a re-issue in 2010, then had to do another re-issue in 2013. The claims are things like The method of pictorial representation in claim 2, further including determining the coordinates of the data in a new coordinate system The claims they were accused of violating were found to be invalid. This went to jury trial. Patents are great, but the more I read software patents, maybe they should be limited to something like 6 years. To be clear - I think it IS possible that their stuff was "stolen" - in the sense that a number of people probably have had ideas of maps in computers, I know I had an old multi-cd encyclopedia that I think actually had a cool spinning globe which was cutting edge back in day. Their zoom in piece looks like the most unique (sets of more detailed tiles). I'm not sure when level of detail methods came out really, I know in gaming they were around for a while and there was a terrain generator as well that made great terrain that had some level of detail stuff. Perhaps this was in fact novel?