Google, Microsoft sued over street view map patent
updated 01:55 pm EDT, Tue July 5, 2011
Small Louisiana firm claims to have patents
Lake Charles, Louisiana-based Transcenic filed a complaint Friday in the Federal Delaware District Court claiming that Google, Microsoft and AOL (via MapQuest) have infringed on its patents. At issue are street perspective views that the companies use on their mapping websites. Transcenic is looking for unspecified, but tripled damages.
Transcenic contends that Google's Street View and Earth, Microsoft's Streetside, and AOL's Mapquest's 360 View, all infringe on the company's patents for technology that enables collecting,and manipulating panoramic imagery
None of the parties involved were available for comment.
Google is already involved in several lawsuits regarding the collection of personal information by its Street View cars. Google claims the information was scraped by leftover code on the Wi-Fi hardware inside the cars, but questions exist both as to how long Google knew it was getting data and how much it knew had been scraped. Initially, Google claimed to have not had any private information only to backtrack and say there had been privacy breaches afterwards. It instituted sweeping privacy policy changes inside the company to try and prevent the debacle from happening again. [via PriorSmart]
