Industry News

Last month Justice Muir in the High Court of New Zealand ruled in favour of Otoy in the copyright infringement case Otoy vs Andrey Kozlov. Andrey Kozlov, a former employee at Otoy and the developer of FStormRender, was accused of using IP from Octane to develop his software. The court has ordered that Otoy be awarded $50,000 in exemplary damages and granted permanent injunctions preventing the sale, download or supply of infringing versions of FStormRender. You can find the full ruling documents on the Ministry of Justice website and read a reaction, including a presentation of Otoy’s evidence, from the founder of Otoy Jules Urbach on Medium.

Update. Andrey Kozlov has responded to the evidence presented in Jules Urbach’s Medium post via the FStorm Facebook group. He claims that the source code was provided for the Russian lawsuit, not the recent ruling, and that sharing it’s contents it illegal under Russian law; explains the reason for the code similarities is due to the use of the same open source libraries and the appearance of the words Octane in the source code as because FStorm contains an Octane to FStorm scene converter. You can read his reaction in full on Facebook.

The lawsuit is continuing in the Russian Courts.