Art+com v google did happen and is findable via a web search. What's not clear to me is whether this is anything more than a typical NPE/patent troll lawsuit. (Google won the lawsuit and the patent claims were invalidated because of prior art or other reasons.)
As I get it from reading around Wikipedia they actually had something very similar to Google Earth before Google Earth/Maps happened. So I don't think it's fair to bring this in connection with patent trolls.
However, Google didn't seem to copy any of their tech but just implemented the same idea (a searchable/zoomable globe/map), which doesn't strike me as surprising as the idea isn't too farfetched and the tech is very much related to 3D graphics and game development, which had already come pretty far by 2004.
So the trailer implying they actually had it first and Google couldn't have done it without them seems pretty peculiar to me.
Looking at the federal court decision [1], it looks like the patent was predated by an implementation that was demonstrated at SIGGRAPH, and apparently the creator of that gave the source code to the plaintiffs?!
"Lau further testified that, at the SIGGRAPH '95 conference, he performed live demonstrations of SRI TerraVision to at least 500 people, and in fact “gave [ ] the source code to TerraVision” to Art+Com employees who were in attendance and “walk[ed] them through the source code.”"
AFAICT it was only a tech demo. They describe it as a "research project" commissioned by Deutsch Telecom on their website. I don't see any indication that this company were actively marketing or otherwise deriving economic value from it when they did the lawsuit, or even when Google Earth was first announced.
“Terravision was a joint project from Weathernews International (Hiro Ishibashi, Andreas Schneider), ART+COM and DeTeBerkom.
The series is a fictional adaptation of the events at that time and arose from the court transcripts as well as conversations with Joachim Suater, Pavel Mayer, Axel Schmidt, Gerd Grüneis, Martin Sibernagl.”
It's a highly one-sided version from people who rightly IMO lost their case and had their patent invalidated.
The show left out Keyhole, which actually wrote Google Earth before Google bought them. It was written 100% from scratch and based on different and better technology.
