Updated 10 July 2018
CGPress has received the following statement from Lavely & Singer, P.C. the law firm acting as litigation counsel to OTOY in the case of OTOY v. Kozlov:
OTOY is proceeding with all of its appellate rights, as the ruling from the Russian court last month is still subject to review by the Court of Cassation. In the meantime, the only final judgment in this matter is the one issued by the New Zealand High Court in 2017 whereby the Court entered a permanent injunction against Mr. Kozlov and ordered him to pay exemplary damages for infringing upon OTOY’s copyrights in and to Octane Render. Accordingly, OTOY is seeking reversal of the Moscow City Court’s ruling based on the overwhelming evidence of infringement, including the testimony of an independent expert witness who compared the two software programs and found substantial evidence proving that FStorm was unlawfully copied from Octane Render.
We will continue to report this story as more information becomes available.
In a copyright dispute between OTOY and FStorm, the Russian Court have ruled in favour of FStorm, the GPU renderer developed by Andrey Kozlov, a former employee at OTOY who had formerly worked on Octane. Andrey Kozlov, was accused by OTOY of using IP from Octane to develop his software. The accusation was upheld by Justice Muir in the High Court of New Zealand who awarded Otoy $50,000 in exemplary damages and granted permanent injunctions preventing the sale, download or supply of infringing versions of FStormRender.
Following this, the lawsuit continued in the Russian courts, and according to documents shared on the FStorm website, have ruled in favour of FStorm in a recent appeal.
In the summary of the courts findings posted by Andrey on FStorm’s forum, experts from the Center of Digital Information Research of the Moscow State Technical University of N.E. Bauman, who were assigned to analyse the software, came to following conclusions:
1) the source code / program code of the FStormRender ECM program is not the replication (copy) of the source code / program code of the OctaneRender ECM program;
2) any signs of the source code / program code of the FStormRender ECM program being the replication (copy) of the source code / program code of the OctaneRender ECM program are absent;
3) any signs of the FStormRender ECM program being the reprocessed version (modification) of the OctaneRender ECM program are absent; 4) any signs of the FStormRender ECM program being the result of reproduction (copying) the OctaneRender ECM program are absent.
As of 29 June OTOY had not responded publicly to the court’s findings, but we’ll update this post when when we hear more.
As a result of this ruling FStorm is once again available for sale and download. You can read the announcement made by Andrey on the FStorm Forum, including links to the court’s rulings.
Congrats on this, copyright infringement claims can get out of hand quickly when multi-million companies are involved, glad small developers are able to defend themselves successfully.
If you think that this is over then I’ve got some bad news for you. They each venue shopped to get their desired legal result. The impartiality of each court might, maybe, perhaps, possibly be a little less impartial than you’d think. Otoy has a copyright infringement ruling on their side to use when they start the whole thing again wherever a NZ ruling has the most advantage.
From my understanding and what I remember reading, the NZ never had contact with the source code, s there’s no way they could release such a ruling.
This also looks very far fetched: “including the testimony of an independent expert witness who compared the two software programs and found substantial evidence proving that FStorm was unlawfully copied from Octane Render.”
That point applies to the FStorm experts as well since it doesn’t look like Otoy supplied source code to Center of Digital Information Research of the Moscow State Technical University of N.E. Bauman. Maybe someday this whole thing will get to an impartial jurisdiction but until then Otoy is just going to try to bury FStorm in legal costs.
Now if they change their ugly website! 😉
yeah I know, the ugly red menu items on white background….it is unbearable
OTOY are such bullies they tried the same thing with the guy who developed Blender’s Cycles renderer
They are a perfect example of what the industry was like 15 years ago, everyone tried to find something new and hold tight on their secrets, since then most have opened up and knowledge sharing has never been greater, but I guess if you are bad at your job and your main developer leaves, your only option is to throw mud at everyone, instead of getting better yourself. OTOY is trying to delay and do damage in hope that fstorm gives up, but they have completely missed the fact that every time they do this non-sense, fstorm gains a ton new followers as a result of being the underdog, better, cheaper etc. It’s simply just a bad business strategy moving forward what OTOY is doing.
Maybe Redshift will be next? because they are gaining a lot of Octane users recently, surely they have to have stolen something too right? 😛
and a few others too: http://christopheremoore.net/otoy/
holy moly.. that is disgusting… and she has the audacity to write for the extreme left leaning huffpo about “How to Create Supportive, Healthy and Compassionate Relationships in Business” .. i’m puking.. even though there are always two sides to a coin from what i’m reading in the documents the people running the company are sociopathic and batcrap crazy.. unfollowed Otoy on all social media instanly
This is a rather sketchy situation on both parties. If i were a company licensing software I’m not sure id want to purchase or invest in either one of these products.
I like otoy, because i can actually buy a license from them , i can’t do that with Fstorm
Because of otoy…
well… that´s true, but it won´t last, I assure you that, they are partnered with Autodesk, and their main target is making all the rendering a cloud service… and more things as an “only-on-cloud” service…
Sure you can buy a license for FStorm. Here you go:
https://fstormrender.ru/checkout/
?? just says rental $20mth – where is permanent license info?
Yep, subscription only. Just the same as you are paying for Max. Or are you working with a cracked Max version? 🙂
what makes you think i’m using a cracked version???? i use 3dsmax 2015, all paid up thank you.
your still paying right?
As always… subscription only is bad…
if i blender had a version of CAT i’d dump max in a second
buying the license and renting it are two very different things. i personally would stfu if i were that clueless, not accuse others of piracy.