Posted by speckx 3 hours ago
Obviously this is intended as a scare tactic, but, surely that could never hold up in court? Surely the burden of proof is on the owner of the patents to prove that someone's work is infringing, and you can't then say "We are charging the defendant to prove that we have a valid case against them." ?
There is no universe in which this is a reasonable response.
DisplayLink on the driver side just compresses frames to send them over USB.
It would be interesting to analyse if Synaptics haven't stolen code from open source ffmpeg or VLC to do the compression.
“You are stealing our ideas! But we won’t tell you which ones unless you pay us”
In any other domain this would be called a protection racket.
the tradeoff is that it becomes free eventually, unlike trade secrets
if I patent a microwave and specify exactly how it works, that part can't be trade secret
BUT if my trade secret is on using ruby diamond for deluxe premium microwave lazor THAT isn't specified on the patent, well that be a trade secret
but trade secret CAN ONLY BE PUNISHED IF someone insider leaks the info -- not much can be done if some junk collector finds out about the ruby stuff
But lawyers are prone to using scary phrasing, even if that phrasing has no bite, and are free to write strongly-worded letters.
"I see that you've been publishing the privately-held, trade secret tomato processing technique I developed -- on the Internet! Now, tomato processors everywhere can see it! I'm really pissed! I demand that you stop doing this immediately! In fact, if you want a full enumeration of whar I really think about the terrible things you're doing, then I further demand that you pay me $25,000 for that effort!"
...it's got no bite, but it's a letter. It can be drafted and sent.
(It can also be ignored upon receipt.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_around
> Design-arounds are considered to be one of the benefits of patent law. By providing monopoly rights to inventors in exchange for disclosing how to make and use their inventions, others are given both the information and incentive to invent competitive alternatives that design around the original patent. In the field of vaccines, for example, design-arounds are considered fairly easy. It is often possible to use the original patent as a guide for developing an alternative that does not infringe the original patent.
However, there is no universe where they can hold a valid patent that would encumber a driver for a regular USB display device. What they then might try to do is invoke DMCA, due to the device having DRM responsibilities (HDCP).
If they get trusted HDCP treatment from media players on some platforms, they might fight tooth and nail to not be broken open in public as that might end up with them losing trust from content providers...
Or maybe they're just assholes with no real rhyme or reason, who knows.
Good riddance if this is how OSS is treated by synaptics.
Most recent thunderbolt docks and usb4 docks have good display support, and fallback to DisplayPort alt mode if the host does not support tbt4. Which is much better supported over type-c. Intel and AMD upstream host support.
https://www.onsemi.com/company/newsroom/news-and-insights/on...
For a while I'd keep an eye on updates to see if they'd been fixed but they never were before we moved office.
I'm going to be quite sure we don't get any more in any future offices (we don't have them at our current office)
My only "wow this thing just works everywhere" was actually the Plugable brand docs. Obviously can't do things like 3D gaming, but for regular desktop kind of applications dang have these things been largely bulletproof. Especially the older USB 3.0 ones.
I still remember running five displays (including the built-in) off a single cheap HP Split X2 back in the day thanks to a Plugable dock.
Can someone explain this to me? Isn't this the whole premise of reverse engineering?
Patents can be avoided if you can prove that a patent is "obvious to a practitioner in the field" but that's a highish bar to prove in court and requires expensive lawyers
Nevertheless Synaptics are behaving as arse here and as a purely practical matter should be welcoming people who will bring them more customers for free
The whole reverse engineering clean room thing, is to show no copyright infringement and / or trade secret (primarily trade secret). How could they intentionally copy the code, if they cannot see the code.
Patents are far stronger in that sense, but they do have an expiration date. People independently come up with techniques and infringe patents all the time. Look up the patent litigation history of CRISPR which are still going strong it …
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/nobel-prize-winners...
There’s a million examples.
For context, here’s my company IP Copilot - https://ipcopilot.ai/