By Jury. And at the time Google was a highly popular company. I still think a lot of large companies get away with stealing the candy from others.

But Keyhole did not steal anyone's candy. The origin for the product (and I'm paraphrasing the story here, secondhand) was actually SGI'ers had developed a method for efficiently rendering gigantic textures at multiple levels of detail. They looked for the largest texture they could find for their demos, and that turned out to be high-res terrestrial imagery. This demo app then turned into the Keyhole product itself.

This technology was developed inside the world's leading computer graphics company, where people spent 24/7 thinking about how to render 3D graphics and textures better, faster, at higher resolutions. And Keyhole was merely a 3d app that happened to be showing the planet. The other company did not have a valid claim against that.