IPIX Shuts Down Free Software Developer - Again

l-ascorbic writes: "In 1999, Internet Pictures Corporation (IPIX) started persecuting anyone who made software to produce 360 images. They succeeded in forcing Professor Helmut Dersch, the creator of the GPL Panorama Tools to remove certain functionality from his software. Well, they're at it again. They have now forced him to shut his website. IPIX hold several US patents on remapping fisheye images, and first went after US sites that linked to the PanoTools site. Prof Dersch says he may now have to distribute his software using tricks similar to those needed by GIMP to avoid the Unisys GIF patents."

Re:OK, gentlemen

Web link: http://www.lvcm.com/pwp/cothrun/pt/ [lvcm.com] to the PictureTools in question.

I've taken a brief look at these and they appear to be wonderful very useful tools, aside from the patent stuff in question. I appears that IPIX is acting in an overbroad manner by supressing these.

Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos

Whu?

I can see isys having a patent on a particular mathematical formula for de-fishlensing an image, but surely there is more than one way to accomplish that task.

And certainly they can't have a patent on taking fishlense images and making them normal. Because that sort of thing has been going on since Panavision movie-making was developed.

And they certainly can't have a patent on stitching together images, because people been doing that since forever.

Really, all they could patent is a particular algorithm for it -- and I'm not sure they could even patent that, 'cause it's just mathematics!

WTF is up here?

--

Re:what about quicktime VR???

There were rumors that IPIX would be going after QTVR and forcing them to license their *technology*...

The International Quicktime VR Association also has an anti-IPIX page at: http://www.iqtvra.org/noipix.html [iqtvra.org].

We're not talking about copyrights or TMs, damnit!

We're talking about patents! Patent law does not require them to go after people to protect their rights the way trademark law does.

And anyway, the patents themselves are extremely dubious -- it's just that no one has the resources to challenge them.

The reason they're doing this is because they have an untenable business model, and the company is run by morons (and yes I speak from personal experience).

For the only upside, take a look at their stock price -- it's hovering just above the penny-stock range, down from the mid $40's. It looks like they probably won't be around much longer, thank god.

Felten v RIAA

EFF & Princeton Scientists Sue Record Companies Over Squelched Research , at EFF [eff.org].

Since the editors seem to think that the /. crowd wouldn't be interested.

Re:My company felt the wrath of IPIX

This brings up something that I've wondered about patents. Do they really prevent a person from implementing the patent and using it for themselves. I understand if you were making a program to make the imges and then selling/distrubuting that. But if you make the program to make the images, and only you use.have that program, and instead are using/distributing the images, then is that really a violation of patent law? IANAL.

Re:I know

What I don't understand is how they want to force their patents in Europe

Check out the "Hague Convention". This is stuff to be afraid of. Signing countries will enforce foreign judgements!
http://www.cptech.org/ecom/jurisdiction/hague.html [cptech.org]

Re:I know

That's not the point.
the IPIX patent will probably not hold in court, because (apparently) other people have developed similar techniques on their own. The point is that they have more money than you. Therefore they will sue you untill you are broke. And then they win.
The sad thing really is that patent laws were created to protect the little man-with-good-idea against the BigCompany. This has taken 1 180deg spin here (hmmm how ironic)

The "We Must Defend Ourselves" Defence

Unlike Trademarks, Patents do not require defence for their validity to remain in tact. This much is obvious from the antics of BT and their belated (and idiotic) hyperlink threats.

Patents are granted monopolies in exchange for full declaration the invention.

Those holding patents often realise that there is more money to be made licensing the patent to other companies as this tends to make their technocology wider used and a small peice of a huge pie is better than all of a tiny one. This is why Dolby are so successful, for a fee and a balanced royalty anyone can play with their stuff and thus, many do.

There is No Legal Reason why any company holding software patents cannot license them to anyone they like for or without a fee and for this precise reason Bruce Perens et al are trying to get IBM and HP to set a 'social precident' for software companies to not sue free software developers for patent infringement.

IPIX are doing themselves no favours here, if they had the foresight their monotonous press releases suggest ("IPIX, the world leader in..." play another record!), they'd allow free software folk to improve their ideas (they still own the patent underneigth and can make a killing licensing the whole shebang to camera producers).

If you have more to gain by co-operating, and less to lose by calming the legal dept down, do it! Otherwise you'll just find many of those you most want to embrace IPIX stuff won't touch it with a barge pole. They already seem to prefer the other method of stitching images together to get panoramas.

Cluetrain [cluetrain.com] anyone?

GPhoto [gphoto.org] - Free Digital Camera Software

IPIX didn't do this . . .

From a message sent by Helmut Dersch [fh-furtwangen.de] (url http://listserv.fh-furtwangen.de/cgi-bin/lwgate/cg i/lwgate-en-proj.cgi/PROJ-IMIM/archives/proj-imim. archive.0106/Date/article-66.html):

I do not want to comment on your questions but want to emphasize that no one has yet accused PTViewer of infringing any patents. There are many viewers out there which use similar technology and I am not aware of any ipix patent that could possibly apply.

[snip]

Another point: I did not receive the warning from ipix but from a person who is currently being treated by them and their lawyers. I am not authorized to mention details. I hope there is no immediate danger, neither for him nor for us, but it makes sense to be cautious, hence the proposed changes.

prior art?

How is ipix getting away with this? Back in high school I worked for a real estate company and we did 360deg views of rooms inside homes they were trying to sell using software that made QuickTime VR movies (not Apple's, QTVR Authoring Studio was too expensive). About a year after we started doing it, it caught on, and we started getting ads from ipix asking us to buy their $500 software. I had seen qtvr and thought it was cool long before we ever started using it. How can ipix claim that they have the rights to this technology?

---

Patents valid by default

I don't think they have a leg to stand on even with a granted patent.

Courts PRESUME any patent which is granted is valid. The plantiff has to prove infringement, but if he does, than the defendant needs to prove the patent is invalid to win. The plaintiff does NOT have to prove anything about the validity, it is considered valid by default because it has been so carefully (hah!) reviewed by the patent office. (i.e. they glance at the title, and make sure it is paid for before rubber stamping it).

Disclaimer: This is not legal advice.

IPIX - at it again

For the record, the first time IPIX threatened Mr. Dersch (in 1999), it was over a specious claim of alleged copyright infringement.

IPIX has been involved in several tangled intellectual-property disputes. In '97, IPIX went after the Live Picture Corporation for patent infringement, and eventually secured an out-of-court settlement resulting in Live Picture's agreement to stop using fisheye lenses.

IPIX was also the defendant in a March 2000 patent infringement suit involving alleged willful infringement of U.S. patent 5,903,782 concerning "spherical visual technology".

If anyone is interested, I threw up a page [cptech.org] a while back that contains more information about IPIX-related intellectual property disputes.

Sincerely,
Vergil
Vergil Bushnell

More information...

I dug up a quote of Dan Slaters from http://vr.albury.net.au/~kathyw/EyePics/slater.txt [albury.net.au] that I'm sure you will all find interesting:

...IPIX US patents include: 5,313,306, 5,185,667, and at least two others. Some of their claims are quite broad, suggesting that any geometric remapping of a fisheye image is their invention. There is considerable prior art that would seem to invalidate these broad IPIX claims. Variations of fisheye image geometric remapping type systems have been used in aerospace, aerial photography, submarine periscopes, flight simulation, planetarium projection, etc. As an example, one system from the early 1970,s used a 6 mm Nikon fisheye lens in a F-111 aircraft to view wing extension simultaneously on both sides of the aircraft while also providing star image data. Two particularly relevant prior art references that would appear to completely invalidate the broad IPIX patent claims include:

Ripley, D., DVI - A Digital Multimedia Technology, Communications of the ACM, Volume 32 Number 7 (July 1989)

This paper describes an interactive computer based system that dynamically extracts perspective corrected views from images filmed with a Nikon 220 fisheye lens.

Lippman, A., Movie Maps: An Application of the Optical Video Disc to Computer Graphics, Siggraph Conference Proceedings (1980)

This second paper describes an early VR system that used either a set of 4 cameras or a single donut image camera that captured the complete road system in a small town. The viewer could travel down any of the roads in several different seasons and see perspective corrected views. The single camera system could use either the Nikon 6 mm f2.8 fisheye lens or the Kern Peri Apollar lens to record a full 360 degree horizontal view.

Ripley (the author of the 1st paper) is a principle of Infinite Pictures that was sued by IPIX for patent infringment and lost with a million dollar judgement against him. To this day, I don't understand why, as both of these papers clearly describe prior art of undistorting fisheye images to extract "perspective corrected" views, etc.

Infuriating.

I find IPIX's actions to be far more infuriating and monopolostic than anything that Micro$oft has ever done... These people are basically saying that the only way you are going to use 360 images on the web is if you use their software and pay their fees.

Prior-Art exists for the patents that they are trying to enforce... someone should step in (EFF? O'Reilly?) and challenge these patents.

For now, we can make an impact on IPIX... boycott them!
Also, check out http://vr.albury.net.au/~kathyw/EyePics/ [albury.net.au] or http://www.virtualproperties.com/noipix/noipix.htm l [virtualproperties.com] for more of IPIX's heavy-handed tactics.

Sorry I'm not more coherent, but this really pisses me off.

Re:I know

The sad thing really is that patent laws were created to protect the little man-with-good-idea against the BigCompany.

This is a persistant myth.

The patent laws were created for one purpose -- to promote progress by encouraging the disclosure of inventions. Patent laws are not, and never were intended to "protect the little guy."

What about NASA?

Will they have to take their Pathfinder images [nasa.gov] down too?

Re:What kind of tricks?

GIMP simply has no GIF support by default. Theres a plugin for gif support, this is only available from servers located in countries where Unisys don't hold an active patent on the LZW algorithm. So they can't stop the file being served. And people download it.

The tinkers..

If you are an OSS developer...

Call IPIX or drop them an email and ask them why they are picking on OSS developers:

Stu Roberson
iPIX
3160 Crow Canyon Road, 4th floor
San Ramon, CA 94583
ph: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]

Missy Acosta
Ackermann Public Relations
1111 Northshore Drive, Suite N-400
Knoxville, TN 37917-4046
Phone: [phone]
Fax:[phone]
Email: [e-mail]

Cathy Hay
Morgen-Walke
380 Lexington Ave
New York, NY
Phone: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]

My company felt the wrath of IPIX

I work for an adult internet business that shall remain nameless...A little over a year ago we were working to differentiate ourselves from other adult site's offerings. With a little work on my hand, we developed 3d panoramic software to explore the mystical regions on the beautiful nude form (our site is upscale and we cater to both men and women, so it took some work to optimize viewing for the various body types). After a couple months in development, my team was contacted by IPIX lawyers and forced to stop development. They offered us the option of licensing technology through them, but the cost benefit just wasn't there.

It's a shame to see creativity online stifled by overly restrictive business practices by those online. Our company has been forced to use more traditional offerings for our site- mediocrity is now being prescribed by unnecessary and unjust patents enforced by the legal systems of the world.

iluvpr0n. (really)

The math they use is clearly public domain

This is just nuts. The math they use has been around since the 1700s. Artists have been using the process (cf Escher) for ages. I went head to head with them a few years back, pointed out these facts on behalf of a client (IANAL, I am a Programer with an Attitude) and they backed down. Didn't admit that we'd called their bluff, but dropped it cold.

They are bluffing. This is known art, and they know it. Call them on it.

-- MarkusQ

P.S. Still annoyed by their audacity, if you can't tell.