Google Street View is a great resource from Google, but sometimes the pictures can be months or years out of date. This means that billboards in Street View are often outdated and different – until now. Google has filed a patent in the United States that would let them place their own ads – observably something similar to AdSense – over the old, real life billboards.
Google’s patent filing mentions modernizing certain ads – like if a movie theatre owner wants to purchase ad space so the movie posters outside his theatre are modernized to reflect current movies (Avatar) instead of ones from 9 months ago (Monsters vs. Aliens).
But these are the only uses that Google sees for these virtual adspaces. Part of the patient mentions an auction system, where advertisers could bid over the rights to place their ads over the top of old billboards. This could lead to legal issues – like a restaurant buying a prime billboard over a rival.
Of course, there is the legal issue of the billboard owners getting upset about Google making money on their billboards – but they don’t have a case. In 2002, the USA Today paid Sony Pictures Entertainment for placement in the Spider-Man movie. In the movie, when Spidey was swinging through Times Square, the film’s editors digitally removed a Samsung ad and turned it into a USA Today ad.
Samsung, the ad company, and the building’s owner sued Sony Pictures Entertainment, but a court ruled that it was legal. Billboards are big money, and Google will likely be sued by some enterprising billboard company – but they’ve got legal percent on their side.
Of course, this may never come out at all. A Google spokesman told the UK’s Telegraph: “We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t. Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications.”