Advice for Shooting Race Events

As far as I can tell, he has. Brightroom and Smugmug, at least, pay the fees to him. So, if you post your pix to Smugmug, you should be fine.

In 2014, a Federal District Judge ruled that all three of Peter Wolf's patents related to posting and sorting pics online by bib number etc were improperly granted and therefore invalid. This ruling was made in summary judgment during claim construction briefs, after Wolf tried to sue Capstone Photography.

Seven years earlier, Wolf sued SmugMug, Brightroom (now BackPrint), Island Photography, MarathonFoto, and a few other sports event photo companies. That case never received a full hearing, because each of the companies sued ended up settling with Peter Wolf before the case was scheduled. The companies who settled saw a benefit not just from eliminating litigation costs, but by being able to profit from an extra license fee charged to photographers and photo buyers to comply with the yet to be court tested patent grant.

The assumed validity of the patent ended up working to a competitive advantage for those earlier companies who chose to settle with Wolf, because they could advertise (and still do, in the case of MarathonFoto, the largest race event photography company in the US) that they had a license mechanism in place that, for a "small fee", either added to or incorporated within their price for pics and services, would absolve the shooter from any infringement liability. And the fact that the original settlers didn't have to pay these license fees themselves, but simply passed them on to the buyer, made it all the more sweet for them. So while initially they didn't like being sued/extorted by Peter Wolf (Brightroom execs initially vowed to fight the case all the way, and even sought help from the photography community), they soon realized they could profit from an arrangement, differentiating themselves from other services who didn't have a license arrangement. At the expense of their customers, and at the alienation of independent photographers.

It took the courage and personal cash (about $100,000) of an independent photographer named Michael Skelps, founder and president of Capstone Photography, to "End Patent Abuse" of what everyone who read them agrees were ridiculously over broad and non novel patents of obvious ideas that millions of people would naturally think to do as computers and networks and digitally captured images became more readily available. Take a pics of a race where everyone is wearing a number, post them online by the number. Use rate = distance x time. This isn't the brilliance of Einstein.

But it takes the budget of the Manhattan Project to fight for right sometimes, and that was one advantage Peter Wolf had in defending his patents. He would bully photographers by sending them threatening cease and desist letters, reminding them how expensive the legal costs would be to fight him. When Skelps didn't cave in, Wolf even went online, from forum to forum, following and belittling Skelps on public photography forums... saying things like "Michael, why are you taking your family into bankruptcy to fight me, when we can work this out... I can be very reasonable... I just need my fair share of your business for my intellectual property... here's my phone number." Note that the statements in "quotes" are not verbatim, just the general jist.

Skelps stood strong, and did not cave in to these condescending appeals from Wolf. And finally, the merits of the patents themselves saw the light of justice, and they withered woefully within it's bright beam. The patents were ruled invalid. The end.

Good read. I learned a thing here. I didn't know there was a way to sort by bib.

Oh cool, just when I was going to chime in with "here we go again" it seems common sense prevailed and Mr Wolf's patents were smashed. This is good news.