Who Owns The VR Patents?

I posted this into the Ipix post of this forum, but it ended up hiding deep in the middle of it, and as i thought somep people might find it a little interesting sepearatly from the late loss of Ipix, i thought i would add it in as a seperate post.

Sorry for the duplication, but couldnt find how to move the original if possible.

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I might be completely wrong here, but i dont think Ipix own all the patents, they are only licenced to use them from a company called Minds Eye View Inc (MEV) http://www.pictosphere.com/.

I found by accident, that a company called www.360dof.com aka www.vrstitcher.com are licenced to use the patent, and they say

"In addition to VRstitcher, in the area of spherical imaging and the creation of full-360 images from fisheye photographs, IPIX Corporation is the only other company with a license to the above spherical imaging patents provided by Minds-Eye-View, Inc."

found at
http://www.360dof.com/products/panorama-stitching-vr-equipment/vrstitche...

I also found that Ipix have been in court against Minds Eye View, as they have claimed
"Unfair competition and Patent violation"
http://www.pictosphere.com/kwx/news.html

Surely you dont bite the hand that feeds you?

I found on a cached version of the ipix site from a google search
http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:sSC4pW-yggcJ:www.ipix.com/faq_iis2.h...
section 2.14
That they even say about the Minds Eye View here, but then also say about their own patents, so i dont know if they have thier own patents on top of these MEV patents.

So in this sense, i dont think the loss of ipix will have any effect at all on the market, as it is not them that own the patent, they have just paid to use it for a period of time.

Lets hope that the next people that licence it arnt as aggressive as Ipix.

But for anybody with the equipment, looks like www.vrstitcher.com is your baby to invest in if you want something similar to Ipix. Theres a demo of thier software, but i havent tried it yet.

I also found on my little trip around google these other links

http://forum.autopano.net/t525-fisheye-support (similar discussion to this one)

http://sec.edgar-online.com/2001/05/15/0000950144-01-502328/Section8.asp
Ipix Winning a $1M law case against Infinite Pictures, Inc. (now iMove)

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y02/m08/i23/s01 same as above but when they won an appeal and got $1.4M ( i assume this is including interest

http://lists.apple.com/archives/QuickTime-VR/2003/Jun/msg00195.html
Talks about the patents

Sorry for being so anal, but it just interests me how one company can cause so many problems and so much disruption and how they keep winning court cases. I just got 3 speeding points on my licence, i wonder if their lawyer's can get them of for me?

Regards
Ian