My reading of the decision is that Skyline described a specific component they called a "renderer." Their description implies that their "renderer" is responsible for a lot more than coloring pixels on the screen. Again, I’m no lawyer, but I think any equivalence between the two products is very superficial.

I would certainly hope that any court would be very careful in trying to equate things. In the case of some widget, if I use one commodity part in my invention and someone else uses another commodity part in theirs for similar purposes, that might be reasonably called equivalent, though the parts are clearly not the same. But if my novel and custom-built part is a core claim of my invention, I would hope that there would be much more scrutiny as to whether they’re really the same or whether the similarities are superficial.

I think that goes back to the example of light bulbs vs. LED lights. They might be considered equivalent in a patent dispute over some novel parabolic mirror for a flashlight that reflects more light from a given luminance. But if the question for the court is about whether LED lights infringe on incandescent bulbs, then we can’t simply look at the fact that they both produce light. How they work and how they’re composed becomes critical. And I often wonder if some of the problems we have in the IP area are due to people abusing this notion of equivalence (not that this is the only concern I have).

Anyway, I don’t believe the Skyline patent covers the user experience, or even mentions a 3D globe iirc. It seems to try to lay claim to inventing a method for sending hierarchical blocks of terrain data over the internet, which in other areas is often called "a multi-level cache" or "client/server" and would be an obvious solution to any skilled person in the trade. Several of the methods GE uses might not be obvious, but we chose to protect those as trade secrets, which is why I asked about how Skyline could use the source code if they have it.

But if you’re a lawyer, I’d suggest reading the decision directly. You may be in a better position to interpret it. It’s linked at the bottom of my post. Let me know what you think.

The doctrine of equivalents allows the federal court system to hold an alleged infringer liable even though there is no literal infringement, if it can be shown that there is atleast equivalence on the missing element. So if the patent in suit claims elements a, b, and c, as either steps of a method or elements of a system or an apparatus, and if a and b are shown to exist literally, but only an equivalent found for b, under the doctrine, the alleged infringer will be found liable.

from my understanding of the judge’s findings, there was a component in GE that performed the “rendering” steps of skyline. my confusion is about what stopped the judge from going further with that analysis to say that there was atleast equivalence under the doctrine.

i dont know about the other elements in the patent’s claim, but since the discussion in the article was about this “renderer,” i am assuming that the patent is so broad that it covers all the “user experience” aspects, generaly sweeping over the rendering aspects; and the judge found that since Skyline’s patent disclosed merely the “rendering” steps and not an actual “renderer” component, there was no literal infringement. i understand from your response, post and other material, that there are many other inherent differences; but if the judge could find that GE had a renderer and Skyline had steps that disclosing its general functions, what kept him from drawing a conclusion that there was equivalence.

i also had a question; seeing as how you were involved in GE’s design.(?) so perhaps you know. did Google turn over its source code for GE to skyline’s lawyers so they could perform an infringement analysis?

I don’t completely understand the law on what counts as equivalent. But the judge seemed to take the wise (IMO) opinion that simply because two things seem to produce similar outputs, their workings (i.e., what is protected) may not at all be the same. He cited the relevant case law in the ruling, FYI.

Patents should IMO be limited to what is described, not some general class of inventions that might follow, for which the "inventor" has no reasonable claim to have invented — and perhaps can’t even describe except in general terms. [And then there are patents granted that don't even do what their own inventors claim. There's a Sony mind-reading patent like that. They guessed they could use sound waves, but it's not clear they even tried to build the thing to see if it worked.]

So if I patent the incandescent light bulb, I can’t claim the rights to candles, florescents and LEDs, unless they use the method I described (which they don’t). Google Earth doesn’t use the same method as skyline, except in the most generic sense — it gets user input, it transfers data over the internet, it draws imagery. But it doesn’t do that in a way that reasonably resembles Skyline’s method. The fact that Skyline itself apparently couldn’t identify a single part of the GE code that corresponded to the "renderer" they described is telling.

Anyway, I realize that some recent "inventions" (like 1-click ordering) would be hard to distinguish if they visibly seem to do the same thing. It seems to be the user experience, not the underlying method, that is patented in those cases — I think those patents should not be granted anyway for that very reason, among several others I could name.

So if Skyline had patented "a 3D interactive globe with terrain, imagery, and other geographically-fused data streamed via the internet," they might have had a better shot claiming GE was equivalent (though it would be hard to claim they were first). But then again, such a patent should never be granted in the first place. And, as it turns out, that’s not the patent Skyline wrote.