Russian court finds in favour of FStorm, OTOY seeks reversal of the ruling

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.