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You're right about the patent thing. Ipix aparently has a patent that they are using on Quicktime QTVR and panotools. more info warning - these links seem a bit old; I wonder what the progress has been. These are pretty simple algorithms (not trivial to implement, though) and are exactly the type of patents I hate... argh...

You're right about the patent thing. Ipix aparently has a patent that they are using on Quicktime QTVR and panotools. more info warning - these links seem a bit old; I wonder what the progress has been. These are pretty simple algorithms (not trivial to implement, though) and are exactly the type of patents I hate... argh...

are acting like Scientologists.

...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.

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/ or http://www.virtualproperties.com/noipix/noipix.htm l for more of IPIX's heavy-handed tactics.

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

According to this history of the case IPIX even insists that its own threats are copyright, and "any dissemination, distribution, retention, archiving, or copying of the communication is strictly prohibited" But there's a copy of the original email on this excellent (and scary) patent watch site at MIT.

The most interesting thing is IPIX's belief that it "owns the copyright in the format it utilises", and that therefore it has a share of the copyright of the data-file of any image in that format, which it can use to restrict how that data-file is used.

From Dersch's (IMHO) staggeringly mild and reasonable summary of the story so far, it appears that they are still trying to push this claim, which is like Microsoft claiming copyright and distribution rights over every document in Word format.

In this case we might be lucky because IPIX didn't invent the format.

But think of (say) the MPAA claiming such a veto on any file using their new music format. In fact, under the new laws against script-kiddies even describing such formats might become actionable, as abetting the theft of copyright content.

This is a nasty can of worms and it's important for all of us that Dersch sees off IPIX with no compromises.

Before reading the post I've surfed on the different links provided and they were saying that IPIX first said that the man had pictures copyrighted by IPIX on his site (which was false since he did all of them himself) and after that they said that to provide the informations to convert to and from IPIX files he needed some information from inside the company "but they use a public domain format, which is openly documented by the US-company "C-Cube Microsystems"." And furthermore as he say himself "there is no such thing as a copyright on a file format".

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