Facebook, Princeton the Target of 3-D Object Data Suit from Home Design Site

An attendee wears the Oculus VR Inc. Rift S virtual reality (VR) headset and controllers during the F8 Developers Conference in San Jose, California, on April 30, 2019. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Facebook Inc. and Princeton University have been hit with claims from a home design website that they scraped data from more than 2,500 three-dimensional objects and 45,000 scenes vital to the development of computer vision technology.

UAB “PLANNER5D,” the private Lithuanian company behind the Planner 5D website, sued Facebook and Princeton for copyright infringement and trade secret theft in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Thursday.

“Defendants' copying, misappropriation, and especially public disclosure and dissemination of Planner 5D's design files threatens to destroy the market for Planner 5D's core asset,” wrote the company's lawyers. “It has inflicted catastrophic and potentially permanent damage on the company,” they wrote.

Representatives of the company and the university didn't immediately respond to messages Thursday. Planner 5D's lawyer, Marc Bernstein of The Business Litigation Group in San Francisco, said in a phone interview Thursday the company is considering adding more individual, university and corporate defendants as it learns more about how the data was scraped and shared.

“The company takes this seriously because they consider this a significant threat, and they think this data is a key ingredient for scene recognition research,” he said.

According to the complaint, Princeton researchers working in the computer vision field studying ways to give machines the ability to recognize three-dimensional scenes had identified a lack of data as a significant hurdle within the field. The complaint claims that Princeton researchers developed a data set built from scraping Planner 5D's library of object and scene files, a practice which is banned in the company's user agreement. Planner 5D's library took more than seven years and millions of dollars to create. The suit says that the data set, named SUNCG by the Princeton researchers, is 99.9% identical to files in Planner 5D's collection.

Planner 5D's lawyers further claim that the SUNCG data set has been copied and distributed as part of the Scene Understanding and Modeling (SUMO) Challenge, a Facebook-backed competition aimed at developing “3D scene understanding and modeling algorithms.”

“Like Princeton, Facebook is exploiting the Planner 5D dataset for the same purpose Planner 5D has set for itself: to train artificial intelligence applications to recognize 3D interior scenes,” wrote the company's lawyers. “Worse, Facebook explicitly secured from SUMO Challenge participants the right to commercialize the fruits of their work. This strikes at the heart of Planner 5D's business objective,” they wrote.

The suit claims that Planner 5D didn't learn of SUNCG until 2018 and that the company asked Princeton, Facebook and others to cease and desist from using its copyrighted material in March 2019. A link to the SUNCG data set on the SUMO Challenge website currently redirects those who click on it to the Princeton home page. Berstein said Thursday that the link had been rerouted after Planner 5D's cease-and-desist request. He declined to say how the company learned of the SUNCG data set's existence.

The suit brings claims of copyright infringement as well as claims of trade secret misappropriation under both the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act and the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act against Facebook and Princeton, as well as unnamed individual, corporate and university defendants.

Read the complaint: