wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: End of panorama photography in Germany?
Scott Highton 2013-Jul-22 15:44:00
Richard wrote: "IPIX in USA was defeated as someone stepped forward saying they had prior patents... perhaps one of the old timers on the list is reading this and this can be helpful in some way- do US patents apply in Germany?"
I suppose I've been around as long as anyone here to be considered an "old timer" (grin).
It's important to understand that IPIX was not "defeated" by someone stepping forward saying they had prior patents. IPIX ultimately failed because of poor management decisions and a business model (charging "per click" fees for every panorama assembled using their software/technology) that their users ultimately rejected.
IPIX, in fact, was both successful and aggressive in legal protection of their patents, and put several companies / individuals out of the VR panorama business in the process. Basically, if your panorama technology involved shooting with a fisheye lens (two, three, or four shots per panorama) and stitching the images together to create a 360?x180? panorama, they claimed you were in violation of their patents. They won a $1 million (US) judgement against Smoothmove (forcing them into bankruptcy), and forced Helmut Dersch to suspend his development and publication of the popular (free) PanoTools software. There were a number of others targeted by IPIX, as well (Live Picture/PhotoVista, etc.).
The primary IPIX technology was US Patent 5,185,667 (granted in February, 1993) and reissued in May, 1999 as RE36,207.
Ford Oxaal did make a claim against IPIX, Kodak, Nikon, and Cedant for violating HIS patents. Oxaal's primary patent in this regard is US Patent 5,903,782. (Oxaal claimed that he had shown his "bubble viewer" to Steve Zimmerman and Lee Martin well before they developed their own system/company -- TeleRobotics International, which then became Omniview -- which ultimately became IPIX, and that IPIX violated his patents with their result.) Oxaal filed suit in May, 1999. However, rather than pay for a protracted court battle, IPIX settled with Oxaal for what was reportedly a negligible annual licensing fee. In this way, IPIX won by keeping their patents intact without the risk and expense of a protracted court battle, and Oxaal won by being able to say that IPIX had licensed HIS patents. Oxaal himself subsequently went after other entities who offered spherical VR imaging solutions using fisheye lenses, demanding licensing fees and threatening legal action.
In July, 2006, IPIX filed for bankruptcy. It was a publicly traded company whose stock price had once been in the $30+ per share range, but even after going through a 10:1 reverse stock split, was trading at the penny stock level. In January, 2007, Sony Corp. was the winning bidder on IPIX's patent portfolio (28 patents) and other intellectual property at the bankruptcy auction, with a winning bid of $3.6 million. As part of the deal, according to Oxaal, Sony and Oxaal cross licensed their affected patents to each other. Oxaal won a subsequent bankruptcy auction for IPIX's physical assets, including the ipix.com web domain and various equipment, with a high bid of several hundred thousand dollars.
I'm not sure that any of this will help the current situation in Germany. Unfortunately, there is a long history of various patent trolls and other greedy parties seeking to stifle innovation in the VR community for their own profit. Many of the claims (as well as the patents issued) have been dubious, at best. But the threat of a court battle can be overwhelming to individuals and small companies without significant financial resources, which is what these patent trolls are counting on in order to squeeze licensing and other fees out of their victims.
One of the most relevant examples of prior art in these VR imaging patent battles has been the work of Ned Greene, and his publications regarding "Environment mapping and Other Applications of World Projections." These were published in 1986 in both Proc. Graphics Interface '86, as well as IEEE and ACM SIGGRAPH, I think.
Regards,
Scott Highton
Author, Virtual Reality Photography
Web: http://www.vrphotography.com
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]