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points by LoganDark 4 days ago | 0 comments

Holy shit, this legal contact is utterly pissed:

> In addition, as I have previously made clear to you, by open sourcing our proprietary DisplayLink technology for whatever personal reasons you may have as a "hobbyist," you would be single-handedly eviscerating DisplayLink's competitive advantage in this crowded market by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our market-leading proprietary technology. We have gone to great lengths and great expense to prevent such disclosures and protect our market space. Your actions are potentially putting tens of millions of dollars of yearly corporate revenue at risk.

> In short, by your ongoing actions, you are effectively making a significant, dramatic, and grave business decision on behalf of Synaptics and DisplayLink that you have absolutely no authority to make. Given the magnitude of the potential damages at stake, we cannot and will not let this happen. We demand your immediate cessation of your infringing activities, and we will continue to escalate this matter through every available legal channel if you fail to comply.

[–] skeledrew 4 days ago

> open sourcing our proprietary DisplayLink technology ... by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our market-leading proprietary technology

This makes no sense. If they're screaming about their patents then detailed specs of the tech would be publicly available via the patents office for whomever wants to have a look. They can't make an argument about losing competitive advantage because that's what valid patents are supposed to protect. And I think there is some kind of hobbyist-friendly clause in patent law, similar to fair use, that allows non-commercial 3rd party implementation of patents, so ultimately they have no valid argument against this, just deep pockets to bury hobbyists in legal fees for daring to clean-copy "their" tech.

[–] LoganDark 4 days ago

IME, patents are generally not detailed specs of the tech. They're intended to detail higher level procedures or mechanisms to prevent competitors from introducing any kind of similar product that uses any kind of similar algorithm or idea. That's how patent trolls retain a competitive monopoly over their niche. You can't expect to reimplement a technology from its patents alone, even if the patent can aid in understanding something you have in front of you.

[–] kube-system 4 days ago

A valid patent must meet the enablement standard -- it doesn't need to be a full implementation, but it should enable a skilled professional reading it to reproduce the concept that it is covering.

The problem is that many companies are able to patent things that are too vague and use them as leverage even if they probably shouldn't be valid patents.

It is a balance, though. If you patent something too specific, e.g. irrelevant implementation details, your patent is worthless because anyone could just change the irrelevant parts.

[–] LoganDark 4 days ago

> It is a balance, though. If you patent something too specific, e.g. irrelevant implementation details, your patent is worthless because anyone could just change the irrelevant parts.

Chemical companies love this -- just look at the refrigerant racket. Or the medicine racket. Both will wait until their current patent expires, then have a new slightly-modified one granted, and get the old product regulated out of existence. The end result is that they keep a monopoly for effectively life, even though expiring patents are supposed to eventually create an open market.

This works best in industries where chemicals need to be tested and approved before they can be used. Otherwise, one would be able to simply change irrelevant implementation details.

[–] kube-system 4 days ago

The root of that problem is regulatory capture, which is a much bigger problem beyond what can be done with patents.

[–] hypercube33 4 days ago

OK, what's stopping someone in a country that can both make the hardware chips and devices and use an LLM and just reverse engineer the chips and not do it publicly? FTDI had this happen with their USB to Serial chips did it not - before AI even was even usable. DisplayLink has been around for a long time; I'd almost wonder when the patents are due to expire (from some searching maybe 2028?) and all bets are off, China manufacturing will just clone it anyway from the patent.

[–] nom 3 days ago

nothing directly prevents you from doing that, but synaptic can block the import of products containing cloned parts and software which reduces the market to countries who don't have treaties with the US around respecting their patents/copyright/..

[–] 123987128369955 4 days ago

On my next relevant hardware purchase, I will try to ensure the complete absence of the market-leading proprietary technology belonging to that company. Glad some other good companies, like ElanTech, compete in this market.

[–] mindslight 4 days ago

Based on that quote, "legal contact" comes across as an utter moron who doesn't understand how anything works. Unfortunately, our corrupt corpo-first legal environment readily gives truncheons to such morons, with which they can bludgeon individual developers.

[–] echelon 4 days ago

Streisand Effect.

Now there are going to be hundreds of clones.

[–] voakbasda 4 days ago

I myself would be willing to spend tokens helping to improve this driver.

Synoptics deserves to lose everything, if this is how they want to behave.

[–] ctmlr 3 days ago

I would be willing to spend some brain power to help improve this driver as well.

The stupid thing is that Synaptics benefits from a popular open source driver that is compatible with their hardware, spending tokens on this is an investment in the DisplayLink platform!

If Synaptics embraced open source they would have some respect and authority over the main line branch, instead now FireBurn has the respect and authority and Synaptics has our distrust and disdain.

[–] LoganDark 3 days ago

Predatory, patent-trolling legal firms like Synaptics profit off of licensing fees and vendor lock-in, just like Oracle. Anybody who can obtain an open source implementation is much less likely to pay those licensing fees, unless they're worried Synaptics is going to somehow discover their usage and sue. Mostly a concern for existing customers.

[–] echelon 4 days ago

If someone can point me to a mirror, I can make a copy in Brainfuck or Prolog or something funny.

[–] wokkel 1 day ago

I would like to add that lawyers that can be bothered to write these letters on behalve of companies like synaptics deserve to lose their license as well.