The Billion Dollar Code

The Billion Dollar Code is a 2021 German television miniseries starring Björn Freiberg, Seumas F. Sargent and Leonard Scheicher. Based on true events, the series was developed for Netflix, where it was first aired in October 2021 along with an additional feature story episode. Plot The plot follows two interconnected timelines. In Berlin of the 1990s, a group of young hackers and art students had founded the collaboration to play at the cutting edge of computer programming and digital art. They had developed a planet browser in 1991 which was used by Joachim Sauter to get funding from Deutsche Telekom in 1993 to start the successful development of TerraVision. In the series, the ART+COM beginnings were dropped, while several of the real persons and stakeholders were fused to a smaller cast, with the fictional Carsten Schlüter as the main artist and Juri Müller as the main programmer. The other storyline revolves around the 2014 patent infringement dispute against Google, alleging that TerraVision was used to develop Google Earth. The fictional character Brian Anderson is based on Brian McClendon and Michael T Jones who did found Keyhole Inc to develop a planet browser. That company was bought by Google in 2004. The movie dramatized facets of the real lawsuit that lasted until 2017, with the script reproducing only parts of the actual court statements to avoid coming into conflict with Google and having key parts of the proceedings fictionalized or omitted. Trivia The names of the main characters were changed for dramaturgic reasons and multiple involved people were merged into two, among them Joachim Sauter, Pavel Mayer, Axel Schmidt and Gerd Grüneis. The featurette shows the actual persons involved in the TerraVision project, except for Professor Joachim Sauter who died in July 2021. One of the co-founders of Keyhole has published a first-hand account claiming to debunk the origins, timelines and interpretations depicted in the fictionalized miniseries.