FC: iPIX threatens German programmer over U.S. software patent

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

This spat isn't as sudden as it might seem. iPIX's lawyers have been 
sending nastygrams to Helmut Dersch, who wrote a graphics plugin that iPIX 
doesn't like much, for years:
http://vr.albury.net.au/~kathyw/EyePics/Spherical2.html

Some English-language background on the latest:
http://www.virtualproperties.com/noipix/noipix.html#anchor10760184
http://caroling.holyoak.com/Access/path/IPIXguillaumeENG.html

Dersch's site is now offline:
http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/
"The Panorama Tools Website is temporarily closed. Please check again later."

Background on iPix patent claims:
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,20891,00.html
"IPIX has a patented technique that allows VR photographers to take 
wide-angle photographs and stitch them together into 3-D panoramas. Net 
surfers can "step into" these pictures and look around."

More:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-2167743.html?tag=st.ne.1430735..ni
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/00/155762.html

-Declan

> -------- Original Message --------
> Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 16:46:15 +0200 (CEST)
> From: PILCH Hartmut <phm () a2e de>
>
> Under
>
>  http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/daa-07.06.01-002/
>  http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch
>  http://www.ipix.com
>  http://www.cityscope.de/pp3n/index.html
>
> http://listserv.fh-furtwangen.de/cgi-bin/lwgate/cgi/lwgate-en-proj.cgi/PROJ-IMIM/archives/proj-imim.archive.0106/date/article-21.html
>
> you can find some info in german about the latest development about the
> Dersch v. iPIX case, see also
>
>         http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/pikta/xrani/ipix/
>         (to be updated)
>
> A German math professor has backed down by removing his free image
> processing software from the web at least temporarily due to threats
> from iPIX Inc., a company that has pursued swpats agressively
> through US courts.
>
> The strange thing about this is that Dersch is backing down although the
> claims from iPIX are based only on US patents.  It seems that even
> without further extensions of the Hague Convention jurisdictions are
> already sufficiently blurred to allow US patents to terrorise European
> software developpers who are only publishing web pages without pursuing
> any business activities in the US.
>
> --
> Hartmut Pilch
> http://phm.ffii.org/
> Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation
> http://swpat.ffii.org/
> 79100 signatures against software patents
> http://petition.eurolinux.org/




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