Slashdot Mirror
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."
Apple's QTVR is quite different from IPIX's technology, although both make panoramic scenes.
The original QTVR is a cylinder view, with limited ability to look up and down. QTVR uses multiple (12-36 usually) photographs and dynamically distorts them in the QT viewer, something like a branching-frame movie, where one can scrub back and forth (and to alternate track timelines), rather than just watch in sequence.
IPIX uses a fisheye lens (usually just two shots) and undistorts the view to make a sphere (NOT cylinder). So, they are attacking others who use the sphere, but not Apple.
This is despite the fact that prior art existed before IPIX's patent was filed. Incidently, IPIX bought the patent from a endoscopic firm (which used the technology to make pictures inside bodies for the medical field), they did not create the technology. Even worse, IPIX charges lame royalties for every IPIX picture. QTVR's are free, and the tools range from free to high end pro prices.
Also interesting is that in the new QT 5, Apple created a new technology they call Cubic VR, which maps out full up and down panoramic views on a cube rather than a cylinder or sphere. The result is no trouble from IPIX, and the earlier versions of QTVR can PLAY THEM as cylinders!
Apple rocks, IPIX sucks.
all they had to do was get it listed on slashdot. the rest will take care of itself.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
He makes these things available _free_ to advance science and art in general.
Among the things that will NOT be affected by IPIX are the ability of his software to correct for normal lens pincushion and chrominance distortion (luminance? the darkening of edges of an image), the ability to do wild and very high-resolution distortions for artistic purposes, the ability to take rectangular images and modify them so you can stitch them into a panorama (I actually have a QTVR panorama of my old studio's early days, done exclusively with Helmut's tools and hand-stitched (with no stretching) before his software helped you do that).
Going after Helmut is a crime. I am glad he is showing the same patient methodical attitude that pervades the rest of his work, and plans to work around the problem in reasonable ways.
My secret fear is that IPIX will try and push its limit, for instance attempting to muzzle Helmut entirely because his algorithms and tools CAN BE used or adapted to the fisheye case. In that event, my outrage would become unbearable- it would be a matter of suppressing the desire to go buy an uzi and HUNT THEM DOWN, and instead settling for scraping together money and paying someone to HUNT THEM DOWN LEGALLY. As in EFF, or some other likely candidate.
IPIX had better know its limits. I consider too-extensive persecution of a 'open' scientist to be an act of war. It's an act of war against the community of scientific information sharing that got all of us where we are, and I can't consider that a situation for simple workarounds. At some point you have to wage war back, whether that's through lawyers or through DOSing or through people planting rumours and destroying their company's stock price even more, or even, if the persecuted scientist is being threatened with imprisonment or violence, threatening back in kind. So far, the most extensive threat being made has been fines and imprisonment through use of the government as a weapon. In other industries (*cough* music industry *cough*) threat of physical violence has often been a quiet and unremarked additional element. Things are escalating, and if people like IPIX decide they want to start acting like the shadier sides of the music biz in their desire to stamp out all possible competition for their product, there needs to be a response ready.
I can't believe anyone would try and suppress Helmut Dersch. The question that is obviously on my mind is, how FAR will they go if unchallenged? Who else is being stepped on? And, can we be certain that all the coercive force being applied is strictly confined to narrow legal claims and patent-related demands? Record labels have often been known to use muscle in dealing with radio stations and programming- hell, Bob Marley's rise was partly reliant on just this sort of strong-arming. How do we know if companies like IPIX cross that line? And there are plenty of companies like IPIX :P
Adobe Acrobat
Acrobat Reader is free, Acrobat Distiller or whatever they call the creator is not. Knowledgable readers will point out that Mac OS X includes PDF creation facilities (there is a printer driver that generates PDF files), but God only knows how much Apple paid Adobe for this privilege. Adobe isn't really a good example here as they have a lucrative traditional software business to subsidize this.
Quicktime
The free version of QT also has some restrictions on viewing (can't go full screen, can't escape custom movie interfaces). And, FWIW, it used to be entirely free until Apple realized people would actually pay for this stuff in version 3. It's possible to get around the limits by using old software that isn't aware of the licensing system.
Real The player and content creator are both free. They charge for the streaming server.
PTVJ_EX.zip
PanoTools.tar.gz
PTVJ.zip
PTViewer.tar.gz
PtFAQ.html
StBp.JPG
PanoTools.zip
examplesWin.zip
examples.tar.gz
On my Gnutella and coming soon to a server near you.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Bleh!
You're comparing apples and wintels. Trademarks need to be defended, otherwise they become part of the cultural landscape and can no longer be trademarked. Kleenex and Band-Aid are on the virge of that now, Xerox was on the virge 15 years ago but came back and now everyone calls it "photocopying."
All this trademark talk is interesting, but irrelevant. This isn't a case of copyright infringement either, unless the professor was dumb enough to copy IPIX's code. This is a case of patent infringement, for which there is no legal obligation to pursue, only financial. If I patent something, I can completely ignore $favorite_OS users who use my patent, but sue each and every $hated_OS user who uses my patent. The trademark law that you are vaugely familiar with isn't an issue.
Before asking whether "we really want to live in a world without intellectual property," I suggest you learn the different types of IP that are legally defined, as well as the opposing camp's arguements. For the IPIX patent, I suggest that making a 360 degree image is obvious to anyone who works with photos and as such is a Bad Patent(tm).
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Since the slashdot kiddies apparently find reading a /. blurb AND and entire article too tiring....
GIMP, by default, distributes a no-GIF-support version of the software. In countries where people can ignore (stupid) US Patents on software, there is a plugin for GIMP that adds GIF support to GIMP. This is how GIMP gets around the Unisys patent
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
What I saw in 1965 was a system of converting a single photograph taken with a fisheye lens in either up or down orientation, and produced a long strip print that gave a view of the surrounding area. You could view it as an outward view and it looked kinda funny, or stick your head in the middle and view it all around and it looked really cool.
I didn't see the actual mechanism of producing it; I only saw the original fisheye image blown up, and the resultant 360 degree connected strip. But how it was done was quite obvious to me. I saw this at the Columbus (Ohio, USA) Museum of Science and Industry. If it was patented then, it has long since expired.
I don't know if this is exactly what IPIX is claiming. But if it is, then their patents are bogus for two reasons: prior art, and utterly obvious. If IPIX is basing the life of their company on this technology, then it's a doomed company.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
As a side note, it would be of use for the patent articles to include patent references.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
At least here in Toronto, IPIX grew fast and died fast.
A couple of good friends of mine worked for them, and all got laid off last month. Sure, this has nothing to do with the patents, but it bears mentioning.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The iPix patent doesn't apply to software that does what you want -- only to software that takes 2 extremely wide angle (>180) pictures and stitches them to make a 360 panorama. Panorama Tools is being re-released without this feature.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Cute. Or make a 1080 degree image, with red, green and blue in different rotations. Yeh.
AFAIK, study and implementation of a patented device is legal, provided one doesn't try to distribute the resulting device. This is because in order to improve upon a patented device, if the device doesn't exist in a distributed form, you, as an inventor or researcher seeking to improve upon the prior art, must be able to build a device upon which to study and improve. That is what a patent is for, anyhow - to give away the details so that someone can build the device from the patent in order to study and improve upon it, furthering the pursuit (and possibly even gaining a patent in the quest)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Well, it is pretty obvious that they are in all their right. Otherwise, these lawsuits wouldn't be getting thru (or else, everyone will just start saying that Justice isn't effective).
Think about it: you pay for the right to have access to thousands of other patented technologies. Why, when it comes to software, do we always want to GPL the world? It doesn't matter that the project was about free software; we're talking about Intelectual Property here. That's why patents exist: to protect indefensive corporations from malevolous open source developers.
--
I have no sig at all.
Panorama Tools is undoubtedly the best toolset for producing panoramic imagery available today.
It is a sad day when a guy as committed to providing great software to the community as Mr. Dersch gets bullied by the U.S. Patent Office and a litigious company who have obviously failed to come up with anything as functional as Mr. Dersch's Panorama Tools.
One can only hope the European Patent Office will look a little closer at the many cases of clear prior art with regard to IPIX's patent, and then throwing it in the bin where it belongs.
Down with IPIX and incompetent patent offices.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I don't know, but it does look like every time we have an intellectual property article we're going to have a post by someone who can't distinguish between patents, copyright, and trademarks but wants to defend the poor innocent lawyer-happy corporation anyway.
the l engine found it in a couple places. rotational clue is /banc/fpbQ/ohc/gra.hqrbe.gfrenupho.anzveun//:cggu
windows and linux and viewer at that one.
-a.e.mossberg
Or is there another set of software that does photo-stitching under Linux?
Just having purchased a new digital camera, I was disappointed to learn that there was a lack of software to do the stitching under un*x. I found links to Panorama Tools (huzzah!) but saw the site was down (no!)
Well, that'll teach the good professor to write software and not release it anonymously.
I thought the whole point of a patent was that you could patent a PARTICULAR METHOD of doing something, say, making 360 degree images. Patents don't cover an entire idea! If you patent a method of creating 360 degree images, and I use a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT method to make a 360 degree image, I haven't violated your patent. Now, if they had a patent on exactly what Prof. Dersch was doing, then, well, yeah, I guess he violated the patent. If not, then what the fuck do they think they're doing?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
When have you ever seen a system that uses two fisheye lenses procuce a panoramic image. If you have, then send this proof to the prof and get this patent out of the way. Otherwise, QUIT SCREAMING "PRIOR ART"!
-no broken link
Who cares!? Degrees are stupid anyway.
The linux community should be making 2 pi radian Spin-arounds!
--Alex Fishman
using tricks similar to those needed by GIMP to avoid the Unisys GIF patents.
What sort of tricks?
What about freenet? Or putting it on Russian servers? Is linking still illegal or did they change that?
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
Let's make 359 images, nobody will notice and we'll be unaffected by the patent.
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
I just find it hard to grasp that it would take "millions of dollars" to spend to get the idea of making a 360 degree image.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
Maybe there is nothing wrong with a company trying to outlaw people from continuing to use a freely available technology that the company had nothing to do with, and make it its own.
Maybe we should get rid of prior art.
Just allow any company to take any non-patented technology, and claim it as its own, and outlaw the previous users of it from continuing to use it.
Maybe we can do the equivalent in the real world. Allow any company to take over any public park, and take it over. For $20K.
IS this the world you want?!?
I sure don't!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
What kind of tricks does GIMP use to avoid Unisys's patents?
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Actually, the reason Apple switched from DPS to Quartz was precisely to get out of paying Adobe for the privilege of using Adobe code. AFAIK Quartz was a PDF renderer that was developed in house.
You might want to read the licensing clause in the front of the PDF and PostScript definitions, btw. It's rather interesting -- it reserves trademark rights but essentially allows both definitions to be mostly public domain. Apple IMHO could have done the same thing in implementing their own DPS engine; I presume there was a touch of politics involved, though.
As for Quicktime... Hmm. I think the thing with Quicktime is that it is, more than even the MacOS or the hardware, *the* crown jewel of Apple's intellectual property. Nobody has created a better version of what Quicktime does and Apple feels the need to keep that going as a potential revenue stream. You may like it, you may not, but that's how it is. (Though I think the real reason they don't open source has a lot more to do with the Sorenson codec than it does anything else...)
/Brian
How many formulas for mapping a picture taken with a fisheye lens to a certain other view? Right, there's exactly one. It's a bijective projection from fisheye-image coordinates into yourview coordinates. The desired view is defined by the application (QTVR tools). The projection is defined by the physical characteristics of the fisheye lense. There isn't a single variable in the mathematics of this transformation. If anything about transforming fisheye images into "normal" images is patentable then it must be in interpolation or coding strategies. The mapping itself is straight forward math.
Wired article here.
I work for an adult internet business ... With a little work on my hand ...
;-)
You're sure that was work on your hand?
After a couple months in development, my team was contacted by IPIX lawyers and forced to stop development.
I'm curious how the IPIX lawyers found out details of your project while in development. (Or had it been released to the public?) Did your competitors know what you were up to? Was there previous contact with IPIX? Were you putting the word out for outsourcing technology or doing press releases or anything?
You are right - QTVR does let you use any camera. This includes fisheye lenses. The cubic format gives a full 360x180 field of view. This was one of the applications of Helmut's tools. It means that you can remap fisheye images to an equirectangular imagfe suitable for turning into QTVR.
Technically, if they patented it, then the method should be fully documented in the patent, which means it is not a secret. This was the whole point of patents, to encourage people to share information while still having it be protected.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Remember how QuickTime VR works? You take a bunch of normal stills and knit them together to make the panorama view. IPIX uses two 'fisheye' lens pictures to create the panorama. Two different techniques to get the same effect.
IMHO, QuickTime VR is a nicer approach, because you can use any camera, but the fisheye approach is quicker.
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Here's a link to a review page of seven different commerical panorama software packages. I'd say IPIX has a bunch of busy lawyers.
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Wonderful humans are more complicated than any theory can explain. Money is a good motivator, I reckon. I'm fairly motivated by it myself. But is not the only one, and many times not the most powerful.
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I wonder if their patent deals only with certain types of lenses or whether it's sufficiently general enough to cover ALL lenses, or spherical reflections, or anything else that could produce a wide field of view. If not, that may be a way around this road apple patent.
--
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
Bleh!
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?
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
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.
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.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Since the editors seem to think that the /. crowd wouldn't be interested.
Best Slashdot Co
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.
-no broken link
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 anyone?
GPhoto - Free Digital Camera Software
From a message sent by Helmut Dersch (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.
WHONEEDSSLEEPWHENWEHAVECAFFINE?!
---
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
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.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
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 a while back that contains more information about IPIX-related intellectual property disputes.
Sincerely,
Vergil
Vergil Bushnell
Insects and Grafitti Photos
I dug up a quote of Dan Slaters from http://vr.albury.net.au/~kathyw/EyePics/slater.tx
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.
m l for more of IPIX's heavy-handed tactics.
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.ht
Sorry I'm not more coherent, but this really pisses me off.
Will they have to take their Pathfinder images down too?
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
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: (925) 242.4050
Email: stu.roberson@ipix.com
Missy Acosta
Ackermann Public Relations
1111 Northshore Drive, Suite N-400
Knoxville, TN 37917-4046
Phone: (865) 584.0550
Fax:(865) 588.3009
Email: macosta@ackermannpr.com
Cathy Hay
Morgen-Walke
380 Lexington Ave
New York, NY
Phone: (212) 850-5679
Email: chay@morgenwalke.com
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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)
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.