After receiving more letters from IPIX-lawyers in the
US and Germany, I decided to stop posting mail and comments about
this case in an effort to deescalate the situation.
However, IPIX kept increasing the pressure with more lawyers,
more accusations and more threats. If I add them up, I
have now received legal threats from six IPIX lawyers.
And although it looked as if an agreement could be
reached, we are now farther apart than Knoxville is
from Furtwangen.
What is the problem? It has little to do with their legal
charges. If you read their initial letter by Paul Stevens, they falsly
accused me of posting images from their site, but don't seem to care much
about these non-existing images. Rather, they asked me to stop distributing
my software and provide email-addresses of people who downloaded
my software, obviously to threaten them also. My page clearly stated at
various points that any published IPIX image must have a valid license
key. Every user following my instructions means another paying customer
to IPIX, so at first I did not understand their stubborn insistance at
all. Also, being able to offer various VR-formats using the same source
photographs is a service which many VR-professionals wish to provide. Today,
a photographer who wants to offer Apple QTVR-panoramas and IPIX panoramas
needs separate cameras and tripods, separate lenses, separate software
and double time. My publication offered the previously impossible solution,
and would bring new professional customers to IPIX. This has been expressed
by many users to me.
Later, through discussions with their numerous lawyers, I found out about their real problem: Users of my software, which do not follow my advice to buy separate keys for each published image, do not seem to come in conflict with IPIX's licenses, copyrights or patents, as I previously assumed. There appears to be a loophole in their licensing system.
IPIX's business is based on per-image-charges. These charges amount to 25-100US$ per image, and are payed by the author of an IPIX-image. The viewer is given away free of charge without any license restrictions other than the usual software clauses. For this system to work, the image creation must be heavily protected, either by patents, licenses, or by technological means like file encryption, forcing the user in one way or the other to buy the key. IPIX failed to provide either of these means. They give away all the protected and patentet parts of their technology for free in their panorama viewer, while the costly authoring process does not involve any patented technology. They choose an openly documented public domain image format (progressive JPEG): Anyone can technically make IPIX panoramas using almost any VR-authoring software. They don't even come in conflict with IPIX patents like the well publicized cases of LivePicture and Infinite Pictures, since their own free IPIX-viewer is used in the process. And none of IPIX's user licenses forbids that: neither that of the plug-in nor that of their authoring software. This explains their almost panic reaction.
The fundamental issue is the copyright to an IPIX image. It clearly belongs to the creator of the image, not to IPIX. They don't even have partial rights to this image as they want to make users believe. Similar cases have been decided by courts in many countries. It is like the copyright to a MS-word document, which only belongs to the author of the document, not to the author of MS-word. Having this copyright allows the owner to do anything he wants with this image, including duplicating it and exchanging the image content with that of another panoramic image. This in effect enables the owner of one IPIX-key to generate unlimited numbers of different panoramas. There is obviously a problem with their business model.
This loophole in their system was not known to me prior to their letters, and probably was not widely known elsewhere. Thanks to their actions, this has changed. And since there is no legal basis to do anything about it, they had to invent charges like stealing images and everything else that followed. In an almost desperate attempt they are claiming that IPIX-images are computer programs, not data, hoping that this would give them control over the images. The reasoning is that the file would contain commands like how to set the viewport in the viewer etc. But who issues the commands, and, hence, is the copyright owner of this 'program'? Again, the VR-author, not IPIX. One of their lawyers even tried to claim JPEG as a proprietary IPIX-invention...
Ironically, it was my intention to support the IPIX file format with this publication. It is often regarded as low-resolution format technically inferior to most of its competitors (Apple, Infinite Pictures, LivePicture, VRML). I have shown that it is possible with my software to generate better IPIX-images than using their own fisheye-method, and that after all their system is not as bad as many people are saying. Knowing their problem, I would even have helped them to solve it, but not now after what they have done.
My position is clear: I did not violate any applicable law in any country. My programs helped IPIX get new customers and sell more keys. The problem they are having is real, but is their own fault. It just happened to surface in the context of this dispute.
They still uphold and generate new charges which, if proven correct, could be addressed by changing two or three sentences in this page. Still, they are asking to remove the entire page as a free favour, and threaten me with expensive lawsuits. As a courtasy I did remove the page from my site and did not answer private requests for this publication, although judging from the letters I got many IPIX users seem to be in desperate need for utilities to improve their images. The only return I expected from IPIX was to guarantee that this would be over by then. Obviously, too much: They expect me to throw away my work as a favour, and at the same time reserve the right to go against my other publications and software in the future. They just announced the next candidate for their actions which is this rather old paper (don't download it! It is obsolete anyway). I believe now, that they want to eliminate my entire work by made-up charges and costly lawsuits. Their record over the past two years is clear.
We agreed to keep our discussions towards an agreement
confidental. IPIX choose to neither keep the confidentiality, nor to seriously
discuss at all. Therefore, I decided to publicly document this case again,
starting with this letter I just sent to
IPIX.