The Billion Dollar Code

Robert Thalheim's The Billion Dollar Code (German: Der Milliarden-Dollar-Code) launched on Netflix in October 2021 across four episodes and was the streamer's first German-language miniseries to centre directly on a real legal case in tech history. The events depicted are largely a matter of public record: the long-running patent suit brought by ART+COM, the Berlin computer-graphics studio that developed TerraVision in the early 1990s, against Google over Google Earth.

The series is told across two timelines (the early-1990s Berlin period and the 2014 Northern District of California courtroom) and the cast splits accordingly between Marius Ahrendt and Mišel Matičević as the younger and older versions of one protagonist, Leonard Scheicher and Mark Waschke as the other. Lavinia Wilson, Lukas Loughran and Robert Stadlober play significant supporting roles. The screenplay is by Oliver Ziegenbalg, with Thalheim sharing the directing credit on the two Berlin-set episodes.

The real-world lawsuit, ART+COM v. Google, ran from 2014 in the U.S. courts in the Eastern District of Virginia and the Federal Circuit on appeal, one of the highest-profile transatlantic patent disputes of the 2010s. The series treats the verdict directly and uses interviews with the real ART+COM founders, including Joachim Sauter, in the closing minutes; Sauter died shortly after the series' release. The show is regularly cited in continental discussions of the European tech-startup ecosystem of the early 1990s.