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IPIX persecutes free software developer
Ellen Spertus writes "Interactive Pictures Corporation (IPIX) has been threatening anyone who distributes software to create 360 degree panorama images, including free software developer Helmut Dersch. While Dersch's free tools (including a Gimp plug-in) are back online, he has had to remove information about creating high-quality panoramas. Meanwhile, IPIX, which charges $25 per panorama created, is preparing for its IPO. Read all about it. If you haven't seen 360 degree panoramas (outside of RL), take a look at Virtual Parks (requires free plug-in) or Sydney Olympics 2000 panoramas (requires free plug-in or Java). "
They didn't do it first, as far as I know Apple did with its Navigable Scenes project in 1993. In high school we did a similar thing using a homemade camera mount that spun 360 degrees horizontally, then 90 degrees vertically. Each frame was added to a a quicktime movie, so to look to your right, move ahead 1 frame, to look left, move previous 1 frame, to look up move ahead 36 frames (10 degrees between shots).
Then there's QuickTime VR which has full stitching support and has been around for years.
This really is theft of knowledge, a crime against
humanity. This company, claiming patent rights over cartesian geometry (discovered hundreds of years ago) is outlaw, and is a blight upon the face of the earth.
I've seen 3-d panaroma java applets over a year ago, but that's not the point. The technology is nothing new, and no big deal. You can create much better just by placing the camera inside a Povray scene within a sphere, against which images are wrapped or projected onto the inside surface, or any 3d interactive program which is detailed enough to be considered photorealistic and rotating the observer (looking in any direction). This has been around for years, if not decades, in computer science and GIS and astronomy and God knows what else. What is a planetarium ?
Do I really have to explain any of this to any of you who passed high school history and science?
If legal methods cannot be employed successfully, and soon, to control and eliminate this theft of knowledge by falsely claiming intellectual property rights over what belongs to God, then war is declared. These people and the corporatins they are using to hide behind are attacking our civilization and the whole basis of intellectual freedom and human dignity. If there is anything worth fighting for, this is it.
First, I suggest a well-organized legal fight in the courts supported by civil disobedience on a massive scale, to have the whole concept of software and algorithmic patents outlawed. Mirror all such sites if you can, and defy all software patents you can.
Stallman would be a good person to spearhead such a legal effort, in the US, with a team of carefully picked lawyers behind him. He should beg, plead and scream for donationations from all persons who want to contribute to a fund needed to accomplish this, or establish a permanent charity for such legal action. RMS is non-violent. Give him a chance to try that route.
Companies and individuals attempting to intimidate others with these false claims should be made to pay heavily, to the point where they are put out of business and/or lose all persnal assets or face jail terms.
If that fails, anything goes. Nerds, you cannot afford to wait another 2 or 3 years. If this kind of thing continues unopposed, this earth will be a living hell beyond the imagination of science fiction writers to properly describe it. These people want to own and control everything, from our DNA to our very thoughts. This is actually happening - hard to believe.
You have your work cut out for you. In the name of God, realize what is happening and do your duty.
I had a friend who worked for the predecessor of IPIX (hence posting as an AC, not as a real person). The original purpose of the system was to be used in hazardous areas (radioactive areas was the main thrust; the company was a spin off from Oak Ridge National Labs (research into how to build nukes) A later idea was to use it for surveilence in cubicle settings (since you'd need only one camera, no moving parts) to make sure everyone was working hard.
/. posting.]
Even then, I wasn't really sure what was so unique about the IPIX patent(s). I remember in their hardware system, they used a Rockwell chip that was designed to correct the distortion in satelite images. So, it seems that there is a fair amount of prior art around their patents. I thought that most of the patent covered mainly the real-time aspects of the hardware. (It could take live video input and de-skew it.)
[and this is my first
Frankly, I'm suprised that *anyone* would bow to that idiotic threatening letter. Unless possibly Helmut did, in fact, snatch an image from IPIX's web site, the entire thing is bogus.
If I were Helmut, I would take the following very simple approach to the response...
Since IPIX feels that their threatening email is also a copyrighted document, and I don't see how I can be forced to acknowledge a legal agreement I have no desire to be a part of, I would simply return the email to them, with a note saying "Thanks but I don't agree with the terms of use for this document", and simply refuse to acknowledge the threatening email any further.
No email, no threat.
One of my housemates (who is less of a Bastard than I) is practically hopping up and down about how posting the litigious email to Helmut's web site could easily fall under the Fair Use clauses, provided Helmut did something as simple as annotating the document, which makes his document a derivative work.
This isn't the first time a large company has tried to suppress innovation by using legal tactics on impovreshed free software developers who can't afford to mount a legal defense. As the author apparently didn't violate any patents and used only publically available information, perhaps he could countersue for wrongful prosecution (Well it works in the US) if this eventually goes to court. I think we definitely need some centralized and trustworthy group to start a legal defense fund. Perhaps the FSF?
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/sol/notices/p riorart.htm
"SUMMARY: The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is seeking comments to obtain views of the public on issues associated with the identification of prior art during the examination of a patent application. Interested members of the public are invited to testify at the hearing and to present written comments on any of the topics
outlined in the supplementary information section of this notice."
Talk about timing.
I can't beleive this... AFAK 360 aren't very rare... Especially since there is a Quicktime format made especially for them: Quicktime VR. So they can't be complaining about the format or the concept of 360 panorama. And they can't be complaining about a toold that help you "stiches" different pictures into a panorama because the Apple Quicktime VR Authoring studio as been doing that for a while and other other tools too... So the question is, what is their problem really...
Is it because they are giving it for free that they are complaining... In that case they just have to add more value to their product to make it competitive. And besides, just like someone was saying earlier... How would microsoft woul;d look with IE in a setting like that...
So I think this stinks and their request is totally stupid... or maybe they should be more precise on what is their problem exactly...
Caus eight now, they look like idiots to me...
I was the lead engineer on Live Picture's panoramic product, PhotoVista, and I know what IPIX's claim is. IPIX claims a patent on the ability to correct fisheye images specifically. I believe their background is in security cameras.
QuickTime VR and most other panoramic technologies stitch together a bunch of flat pictures into a 360 degree pano. These panos have "holes" where the top and bottom are - you can't look straight up or down.
IPIX uses fisheye lenses so that they can get a complete pano with two photos, plus you can look up and down.
Now, Live Picture's PhotoVista used to do that as well, but IPIX threatened us with some ridiculous claim of a billion $ damages. Our research into the history of fisheye images made us confident that their patent had no basis - most don't thanks to the morons in the patent office. Unfortunately, we couldn't afford to defend ourselves - it might have meant a temporary injunction against selling our product. Also, fisheye panos usually have lower quality because the distorion, while easy to correct in theory, is not that easy in real life (no lens is perfect).
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.
We need a format like LivePicture's streaming format. USe of this format enables zooming into panoramas, and much faster load times since the client doesn't need to download the entire panorama image at once.
Like MIP-maps in 3d games, depending on your distance from an object, a server supplies a suitably scaled version.
This is not just applicable to panaoramas, bnut any type of 2D (and perhaps 3D) image data.
This works on a 'tile-based' system, where the image is broken down into a set of tiles, say 100 x 100 pixels each.
A set of 'zoom levels' are also created, also broken into 100 x 100 tiles, you might have a 2500 x 2500 pixel version, a 1000 x 1000 version, a 500 x 500 version and a 250 x 250 version. Depending on how 'far away' the viewer is from the image, the server sends the appropriate tiles.
i.e. if your original image is 5000 x 5000 pixels, and your viewing window is 320 x 200 pixels, the server figures out which 'tiles' it needs to send to the client to fill the viewport, and does so. If you move the viewport, a new set of tiles are sent. This means the client app never needs to download the full 5000 x 5000 image.
If the user wants to see the full image through his 320 x 200 viewport, he can zoom out, but the server then simply suppplies all the tiles from the 250 x 250 zoom level, so that 320 x 200 pixels are the maximum that ever need to get sent over the network. Client side caching of tiles would of course speed up this process.
This information (zoom levels etc.) are all encapsulated within a single file, with options for static serving (all 'zoom levels' present in the file, leading to a larger file on the server end) or dynamic serving, where the server calculates the appropriate zoom and tile settings depending on the image and the client viewport size.
I suggest we need a GNU Image Server capable of using Wavelet, JPEG and any other file format described by some kind of plugin architecture.
This would mean Linux could become the premier platform for the presentation of scanned documents, photographic images etc. If there was a standard, free API and tools for this kind of thing, all sorts of neat, bandwidth-friendly apps could be created.
I'm not much of a coder, but i think i understand what sort of stuff we need here. Its possible an existing open standard for this sort of thing exists (i remember seeing an article about something by Xerox similar to this)
Regards
-Pete
peterb@actrix.gen.nz
Does this mean that the pictures taken by the mars ranger, which were panoramic, were illegal? Obviously not.
The arguement appears to be about the usage of a file format, which I consider to be less important than the technique, but still brain dead.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
No, we don't.
The OSS movement is about a *better way* to do things. Using the same tactics as the opposition isn't a better way, it's a rehashing of the same old crap and will ultimately have the same results.
(NB: this is also the problem I have with the GPL's "fight fire with fire" methodology --- it means that in some circumstances I have to treat GPL'ed software as *proprietary* from a legal standpoint...)
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
Well, we could either drag this whole thing through an extended court procedure to blow off their somewhat simple-minded insistance that they alone have World Domination of the 360-degree photo market, or:
We could create a whole lot of bad press for them, watch investors treat them like lepers, see their IPO fail miserably and their company crash, the execs lose their jobs and their children forced to sell pencils on the street to stave off starvation.
Personally, I prefer the second course of action. Talk about a shot heard 'round the world. We could do it, too -- the same way that FUD doesn't work against the OSS community, we can raise a stink about idiotic corporations like this one.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
It's certainly no problem for a public interest law firm to take on a case for an individual. That's how the ACLU and other organizations work. A foundation that provides funding or other assistance to people who wish to defend their free software work should be fine.
Posted by 747SP:
I went to the IPIX web site this morning, and I took a look at the companies that they cite as being 'happy customers' and who generally user 'their' technique to sell product.
I noticed one of the companies was an aircraft manufacturer.
My flying school has one of the aircraft made by that manufacturer.
So I rang my flying school. I said "Because you use brand-x aircraft, and brand-x financially supports IPIX, I'm not going to fly with you any more". Whammo, thats a $600.00 per month hit in their pockets.
Then I rang the brand-x Aircraft company and said "Because you use a product from IPEX corporation, and my flying school uses your aircraft, I've cancelled my lessons with my flying school, and I'm taking my business elsewhere".
Now you can bet your arse the Cheif Pilot at my flying school rang brand-x aircraft company and
said "what the fsck is it with this IPEX mob?"
I'll be checking the list again tomorrow, and calling the other manufacturers of goods and services that I use and are on IPEX's list...
There's more than one way to skin a cat...
(By the way, this is in no way supposed to be a judgement on the Eagle Aircraft company or the excellent Eagle 150 aeroplane. It's just my way of digging at IPEX from the other end of the food chain...)
Posted by erik the unready:
The comment from a LivePicture person is pretty interesting and suggests that IPIX is aggressively trying to use their (imho) overly broad 8mm lens software patents to prevent competitors from offering spherical solutions.
While 90% of the time regular cylindrical panoramas are ideal for capturing the essence of a place, there are a number of situations where a spherical panorama would show additional things of interest. For instance, a cave, under a forest canopy, an underwater scene, or bizarre points of view inside a Bryce constructed world.
Many of us who shoot a lot of photo VRs would like to have the flexibility to shoot either spherical or cylindrical. But there is no way I'm going to pay $25 a panorama to publish VRs on the Web. No way I'm going to support an organization that threatens individuals like Helmut. No way I'm going to enter into an agreement not to compete with the various partners of the spherical tool-maker. Imagine if Kodak charged you a licensing fee of $20 for every roll of film you shot using Kodak's patented film? It reeks of a monopolistic world-view. That business model could only work if there were no competitors offering spherical panos without per-pano fees. Besides Helmut's excellent tools, there is now another competitor in this niche--Smoothmove is a spherical solution that allows you to shoot using 14mm or other non-fisheye lenses, and without per-pano fees.
Disclaimer: I have no connection with Smoothmove, other than wanting to see some competition in the spherical pano world (well actually I'd like to see ethical people/organizations succeed, but that's dreaming).
Per, of course, has exactly the right idea.
The great strength of it is that you probably don't ever need to spend the money, you just have to have it. You need to be able to say "we can fight back, so it's probably not worth your while fighting us, we will both lose a lot of money but our side will win". It's ideal for a fund.
This has been proposed many times, but as yet nothing has happened. Someone the community trusts needs to stand up and say "I'll do it", the rest of us need only make donations.
--
Xenu loves you!
According to this page, IPIX and this guy are working out a way to continue the distribution of this free software. They aren't outright suing him.
It seems that IPIX believes it owns the ability to limit usage of its file format, to stop people from making use of its viewer without paying royalities (which is a mistake in their marketing model). However, the tone of the page doesn't make it sounds like they are in the inquisition mode of suing all people, everywhere.
It would be nice to have a (moderated) /.)
forum that people could discuss how to actually
make such a format. (a little like ask
Something that would be longer lived than the
news.
John_Chalisque
The organisation (or what ever there is of it these days) that was about this type of thing, is the League for Programming Freedom.
see http://lpf.ai.mit.edu
This is also a good (in name at least) place to look as to where to start setting up such a legal fund. What WOULD be a good idea (if the funds could be generated for it) is to sort out the legal situation in as many countries as possible, and let everybody know where they stand w.r.t the law of their land (I'm a UK citizen).John_Chalisque
Maybe it is time to create a fund for defending free software projects from silly lawsuits. I'd contribute to such a fund. Most free software developers doesn't have the money or inclination to defend themselves against a lawsuit, even if it is obviously groundless. So just the existence of the fund would be a big improvement.
Somewhere to send the threats, and get an answer back "this is obviously groundless, we'll take care of the defence".
PS: I don't know enough about the actual case, to say whether this would be something appropriate for the free software legal defence fund.
--
If a news story just pointed out that the software they are basing their IPO on can be created by a single programmer in their spare time it might cool off investor interest. That way we don't look like a lynch mob either.
red herring - I'm gonna sue your ass! How industry leaders are putting startups through legal hell -- and dampening innovation.
/news-sue.html out.
:(
check this url http://www.herring.com/mag/issue66
talks about the problems with law suits wrt to small firms and big companies and how the small firms loose
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
*** Signal 11 has been summoned. ***
If you're thinking I'm from mediaone - you're mistaken. They're my ISP, not my employer.
If there's a further explanation you find yourself in want of - e-mail me.
--
IPIX North American Sales
1-800-336-7113
sales@ipix.com
IPIX Stockhouse Manager, Jeff Puckett
1-888-909-IPIX
stock@ipix.com
IPIX CLIENTS
Suprisingly.. blank
Maybe you'd like to talk to their investors?
Motorola
Mediaone
Advance Internet
American Express
Financial Advisors
Cendant
General Electric
Invision
JP Morgan
--
More corporate bullshit. Gotta get the cash. Nothing else matters.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
But surely, I can't be the only one who remembers visiting Disneyland and soaring around China in a 360 degree movie theatre?
Then, of course, I've got a swivel chair that creates the same effect; maybe they should sue Herman Miller as well?
And heck, who came up with the idea for dividing a circle into 360 equal portions? Gotta sue them (or their heirs) too!
For that matter, the whole universe seems to be infringing on IPIX's 360 degree panoramic view concept. Can't really sue the big bang. Maybe Steven Hawking? (Or God, for those that think he exists?)
Where do I send my $$$ for the FSFDF?
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Um, amusing that IPIX feels the need to attack the open source plugins when LivePicture is already a commercial competitor to them in the panoramic imaging market. Having been forced to deal with IPIX panos for some sites I've built recently, I'm surprised that they haven't attacked people who create viewers, since theirs is fairly inferior to others I've seen. IPIX really fish-eyes compared to other viewers.
Your proctologist called...they found your head. Remove "no-spam" from email address to contact me
Step 1: Locate IPIX content. Find a large amount of IPIX content on the WWW or anywhere else you can find it, and select one piece at random. By "at random" I mean RANDOMLY, not arbitarily. Generate a random number with the computer, throw a dart, etc. If your random number is "1", go with the first hit - don't say, "That's not random" and generate a second number.
Step 2: Locate the person responsible for distributing the IPIX content you have selected. Be persistent. Unless that person has gone into the Witness Protection Program, it should be possible to locate him or her. It may be easy, or it may be hard, but it should be possible. If you fail, try harder. Hire a private detective if you must, and if you can afford to.
Step 3: Once you have found the IPIX content publisher, call and politely explain what IPIX is doing, and why you believe it is a bad thing. Don't harass. If the person asks you not to call them again, your job is done.
Step 4: Return to step one as necessary, but be careful not to contact the same person twice.
This is very important: don't do anything illegal. Finding a person, calling that person, and talking politely - none of these actions are illegal. Don't take it any further. There will be no need to.
Finally, keep up with the news. If IPIX capitulates to your satisfaction, stop. Vengeance is unbecoming. If they take action which is insufficient, let IPIX know what more they must do.
How about someone make a program that creates 359.999 degree panorama images. That outta piss off IPIX, haha.
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
wait a minute... what is their legal basis for persecution? at least in u.s. (and ipix seems to be an american company) you can't just go after people because they're implementing your algorithms. that is, if your invention is not patented, it's up for grabs. afaik, if they have just a u.s. patent, they still can't force a german developer to honor it. only if they have a patent in germany as well, they could force dersch to pay royalties. does anyone know what basis they have for making those threats?
My other car is a cons.
I am curreently authoring some software that will make "Montages" (see The Linux Image Montage Project), as the software I am using now has a clause in the licensing agreement that states, "this software can be in no way used for commercial purposes" (I am paraphrasing here). It would also appear that the person who invented the technique, has a patent not on the algorithm, but the look-and-feel of a Montage.
What really get's me is that photographers have been making 360 panaramas & photo montages, albeit analog ones, for years. I am suprised that just because the picture is represented by bits instead of film-grain that it makes any difference.
-AP (Jordan Husney)A lot of people have been making a big deal out of IPIX's patent. While I'll agree their patent is probably baseless and that there is a large degree of prior art. This is not what the claim against Helmut Dersch is about.
IPIX is claiming that he violated their copyrights with regards to one of the example photos that he had on his website.
Helmet argues that he took the photo and in fact was even in the photo. However, this is not a total response to IPIX's claim as I understand it.
IPIX claims that their file format is a computer program and as such is entitled to special protection under the copyright laws. While, the information is not clear, I would imagine the supposedly offending photo was in an IPIX format, since the page that they forced him to take down was in relation to how to convert from their format.
So why is IPIX doing this? They are going after Helmet not because they have a problem with his software. While they probably don't necessarily like the fact that his software is available, what they find particularly offensive is his description of how to move from their file format.
They're doing this because their licensing structure is setup such that you must pay *PER VIEW* of their file format. So if you can easily convert away from their file format then you can easily avoid their licensing scheme.
So they aren't trying to protect their patent. They're trying to protect their licensing scheme.
What I'm getting at here, and this might or might not apply in this particular case, is that even if companies don't have any legal grounds for something, they can cause a lot of trouble because most of us don't have the funds or the strength to fight them in court, so it is easier to fall back and do as they ask than to stand up against them.
People have suggested having an organisation that could defend free software projects in court. However, if I've got this right (IANAL so please tell me if I'm wrong, it would make me very happy), with the current laws, only the copyright holder can acctually defend his program and it's unclear to me if some other organisations could even drive a lawsuit against the company without owning the copyright. As I understand it, thats one of the reasons why the FSF has wanted the copyright for some of its programs (like the libc, gcc, binutils, fileutils and others). If someone were to violate the GPL on these programs, it would be easy for the FSF (and for the court who doesn't have to account for a hundred different copyright holders) to prosecute the offender.
So this doesn't seem to be a situation where you can simply say, as a developer, "here; go talk to the FSF instead and don't bother me." Instead you would have to draw the lawsuit yourself and the only thing that another organisation could contribute with would probably be funds to do this. However, I don't think most people would care. Even if they did get funds for it, it would still be much too easy to fall back and live by the rules dictated by a company.
It sounds like Helmut was working on a standard unrelated to IPIX. I believe its for panoramic images using VRML. That's what makes this whole ordeal so sickening - IPIX thinks they have the patent on the panoramic process.
Their first post starts off by telling
Their next post appears to provide a useful resource to the community, listing IPIX contact details and shareholders.
One of these shareholders is given as the Media One Group (mediaone.com). http://www.ipix.com/about/about.html corroborates this. A quick lookup on http://nsiregistry.com gives us a primary domain server for mediaone.com of ns1.mediaone.net. So mediaone.com and mediaone.net are the same entity.
The two posts I have referred to purport to come from signal11@mediaone.net
I don't know what's going on here, but I don't think I much like it.
signal11@mediaone.net has been notified of this reply, so I hope (s)he will soon come and explain themselves. For their sakes, I just hope it's all a big coincidence/cock-up.
It seems to me that what we need is not so much a big bag of money, as a big bag of free lawyers.
There must be some lawyer geeks out there who would be willing to represent persecuted open source developers in cases like these?
Part of the problem with having a trust fund for law suits would be controling its use. Someone would have to decide who was to get backing and who not. With a list of lawyers willing to represent cases for free, it would be up to them if they worked on a particular suit or not.
As a good meeting point, how about if Slashdot were to have a sign up page for lawyers? What do you think, Rob?
If they are in negotigations with the individual, then it's entirely possible that this whole hotheaded discussion will work against the cause.
This does seem to be solely based on the usage of a file format, and whether another author is allowed to use that file format to import into another program. (which of course is the *last* thing you want to happen to your file format!)
This seems groundless, as this sort of thing has been done for years, if you look through MS's site, it shows lots of white papers on how to migrate from lotus notes to exchange, for example, and excel can import various non MS formats.
However, if this stands, it could set a nasty precedent, imagine if gnumeric or koffice were not allowed to have an excel import option? Or if Samba was not able to use the SMB protocol?
The possible repercissions of "you're not allowed to build an import filter for our file format unless we allow it" do not bear thinking about.
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
It would be interesting to discover how far a seriously critical view of the benefits to society of the law of copyright ... would have a chance of being publicly stated in a society in which the channels of expression are so largely controlled by people who have a vested interest in the existing situation. -- Friedrich A. Hayek, "The Intellectuals and Socialism" quoted on The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights
"A gun is a tool, Marian. No better, no worse than any other tool. An axe, a shovel, or anything." Shane (1953)
I'm kinda unclear on what the deal is...
;-)
It seems to me that there's a whole mess of papers submitted at SIGGRAPH 97 (see pages 243-258) and before on the subject of creating panoramic picture anyways. IPIX cannot be "revolutionary" if researchers from Princeton, Apple, and Microsoft Research have been working on this for ages. So obviously IPIX has no precedence on the "algorithms" to create panoramic images...
As for image formats, screw 'em! There's always got to be a better format. Let them make the fatal mistake of a proprietary format, and then us free software mongers shall smite them with an OPEN standard. Thus forcing them to comply! Muhahahaha!
Any takers?
Cheers,
Stryemer
My fortune cookie read:
"You will recieve faster silicon love in your future."
-Stryemer
We are the music makers,
and we are the dreamers of the dream.
-Stryemer
We are the music makers,
and we are the dreamers of the dream.
XAnim, great animation viewer that it is, doesn't handle QuickTime VR, just QuickTime video. The VR pics are a whole different file format/concept.
We need to start getting together to help our fellow man (or woman). I encourage all of you to mirror his site to prevent any injustice of permenant removal. I have just finished downloading it. Should the time come, I will post it.
-- Your mother is an Active Server Page.
The question is how best should we get word to IPIX's potential investors about this problem. Our message should be: You don't want to invest in them since
1) we are boycotting them; and
2) there are more flexible free alternatives like VRML.
Our problem is that the free alternatives (while more flexable) are of slightly lower image quality and we don't want to risk creating any new investors for them via drawing attention to them.
I suggest that someone who knows more about IPO's then I do post soemthing about how to find there future investors without finding any investors who have not heard of them. Note: JP Morgan is handling there IPO.
I suppose we could keep an eye on the chat stuff in forbes.com and fortune.com (at least one of them has one), but I did not want to draw attention to them ammong investors unless people were discussing them already.
Just my thoughs..
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Check out http://www.iqtvra.org/noipix.html and become 100% IPIX free. I guess not having any 3D content on my web page makes my 100% IPIX free. Seriously, IPIX must be stopped as this represents a threat to free software in general, i.e. it would be very bad for us if it became common place to sue on weaker patents as individual free software developers done have the resources to fight these in court. The most effective way to fight this is by purging IPIX's technology from the web, i.e. if you know anyone who distributes content in IPIX format please incurage them to switch formats and maybe point them to the following pages:
h tml 6 237
http://www.iqtvra.org/noipix.html
http://www.virtualproperties.com/noipix/noipix.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/05/30/144
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
http://www.fh-fu rtwangen.de/%7Edersch/sphere_format/Spherical.html is the real page which IPIX forced himn to remove and it is this and it is this page we need to mirror since it explains how to convert from IPIX's image format. If we want to boycot them then we sould make it uber simple to convert from IPIX images to other formats. Can someone please post a link to the original content of this page? thanks..
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
The page about making images for IPIX's viewer was taken down, and replaced with a discussion of the status of the dispute.
Personally, while I understand IPIX has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders (yes, it has some, even though it's not publicly offered yet) to protect the value of its intellectual property, this one's gone just a little too far.
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Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Try getting hold of Xanim
http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/home.html
Does QT Movies and more....
Rooster - A friend. "Anyone's friend in particular or just generally well disposed to people?"
So IPIX doesn't think that people should be giving away software for free that is in competition with their own because its unfair?? What is the difference between him giving it away and him selling it for half their price? Is this just a plow to bog people down with leagal trouble that they can't afford to fight so that they have no choice but to give up? Or is there some leagal basis for this? If this is a legitment argument, how long before MicroSoft goes after Linux distributors for exactly the same thing?