Google accused of stealing balloon network tech behind Project Loon | Hacker News
Apparently, Space Data made a presentation to the FCC in 2008. And the FCC has their presentation accessible to the public.
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=6520007226 [1]
“Welcome to the Federal Communications Commission’s Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS). ECFS serves as the repository for official records in the FCC’s docketed proceedings and rulemakings from 1992 to the present. Consumers can research, retrieve, view, and print any document in the system, including earlier non-electronic FCC documents that have been scanned into the system.”
Lesson Learned: be careful how much is disclosed (sometimes) even to the government. And clearly mark up all slides with “Proprietary and Confidential”
Also, from the complaint something that stood out:
“34. In a March 21, 2014 TED interview with journalist Charlie Rose regarding Project Loon, Google co-founder Larry Page claimed that Google had been thinking of the idea of launching balloons for “five years or more.” During the course of the interview, Mr. Rose asked “But are you at the mercy of the wind?” to which Mr. Page responded: “Yeah, but it turns out, that we did some weather simulations which probably hadn’t really been done before, and if you control the altitude of the balloons, which you can do by pumping air into them or other ways, you can actually control roughly where they go, and so we think we can build a worldwide mesh of these balloons over the whole planet.”
35. As set forth above, however, Space Data had reduced this theory and simulations to actual practice and had conducted over 15,000 flights and accrued over 100,000 flight hours of such constellations in order to understand the wind patterns by the time Larry Page and other individuals from Google had visited Space Data. This concept of “if you control the altitude you can actually control roughly where they go” was something Space Data demonstrated in February 2008 to Larry Page personally with over a dozen balloons in the sky which were actively flying at Space Data’s network control center.” [1]