United States Patent and Trademark Office have reportedly cancelled a crucial Project Loon patent, leaving Alphabet Inc. in a vulnerable situation. This took place after a company called Space Data claimed that they were the ones to come up with the idea of distributing internet in remote parts of the world through the use of balloons.
Since the patent now officially and legally belongs to Space Data, Alphabet’s future plans with Project Loon might be doomed all together. The latter heavily relied on this particular patent in order to carry out the most important activity through their Project Loon. As reported by Wired, Space Data now plans on taking Alphabet to court over this matter. Meanwhile, Alphabet’s self-driving car company Waymo is also in a similar situation with Uber. Uber is being accused of stealing trade secrets pertaining to Waymo’s LiDAR technology to use it in their own automobiles. The company’s operations are locked in court at the moment.
Space Data has stated that they approached Google back in 2007 with the proposal of investing in the company’s balloon-based internet delivery project. In fact, a team of Google employees including Sergey Brin even apparently visited the company’s facilities in 2008. Soon after the visit, Google stopped talks of acquisition and investment. It was in 2012 that Space Data discovered that Google had begun filing patents for Project Loon, which found uncanny resemblance to their project. Alphabet has responded by saying that Space Data’s claims have “no merit” and that they will be “vigorously defending” themselves in this case. Meanwhile, Space Data has already gained victory in this matter.
