California-based Vederi company filed a lawsuit against Google on Tuesday, alleging the Internet search giant's Street View system violates its patent.
"We are confident that Vederi has strong patent rights that are directly infringed by Street View," said Vederi attorney David Dillard. "It's stunning how closely Google's Street View tracks the Vederi patented technology, down to the integration of advertising directly within the Street View product through branded icons."
The lawsuit, filed in a Los Angeles federal court, alleges that Vederi co-founders Enrico Di Bernardo and Luis Goncalves own the technology patent used in Google's Street View that allows users to visually navigate streets within a geographic area.
Google's Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides panoramic views from various positions along many streets worldwide.
Vederi's first provisional patent application for its system was filed in 2000, years before the launch of Google Street View, the company said.
It said Di Bernardo and Goncalves co-conceived the idea in 2000 to build a system to let Internet users look at street-level views of neighborhoods, when they were pursuing doctoral degree at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Los Angeles.
Named StreetBrowser, the Vederi system appeared on the City of Pasadena website for several years in the early 2000s, the lawsuit states.
